I have a low tolerance for boredom. This is not be confused with purposely doing nothing. It takes a lot of work for the former to happen; the latter is bliss.  

As a gal who’s lucky enough to be surrounded by people who are amusing, inspiring and witty on a regular basis, I sometimes forget that not everyone is born with a personality. There are, in fact, a surprising number of people in the public pool of everyday interaction who are not. 

When I was younger, I found it not just a challenge, but my social duty to find common ground with anyone. I once spent 45 sober minutes talking with a drum-and-bass-loving, hardcore vegan from Florida. He wasn’t even that cute, and yet I felt compelled to find something to bond over. And then it happened: We went to the same gym and hated the same grunting fitness jerk-offs. 

However, I’m now at the point in adulthood where extending my cordiality is no longer a necessity.

I was recently at a small dinner party where I ran into old acquaintances I see every other random year. For this group, I pulled out the easy standards—What have you been up to? How is work going? How are your babies gestating? I tried to riff off their one- and two-sentence answers (“Six months along, eh? I knew a gal who once brought her baby to a club and the kid slept through the whole thing! Newborns are resilient!”), but then came the head nods, and I knew that they weren’t going to play along. It was up to me again to find a new topic to discuss. (The Kardashians! They must watch the Kardashians!) But then I imagined an earnest discussion where their contribution would be, at best, “Oh, yeah, her marriage didn’t last too long, huh,” and I wouldn’t be able to fake it any longer. So instead, I got out of my chair and walked over to someone I knew could discuss the finer points of Scott Disick becoming the most charming member of that entire family, or, you know, the physics of nuclear fission or radioactivity or something. I didn’t even bother giving the other ladies an “excuse me” or “I gotta grab another drink” blow-off, which totally would have been acceptable and deserved for having instigated the discussion on “Which is cuter: the in-facing or out-facing baby bjorn?”

I guess to clarify, I have acquired a low tolerance for averting boredom. I’d rather purposely do nothing alone.    

One of my favorite things is rediscovering a song to be the most amazing piece of music you’ve heard in a very long time. It’s usually one of those numbers that starts off slow, builds and builds—your feet stomping, your head nodding in agreement with every fucking beat hit—until the chorus explodes all over you like confetti on an Oprah giveaway. You’re screaming the lyrics from the depths of your lower intestine, but this is only a tease; it’s about to get better.

The tension is released as the second verse begins, just so it can balloon again and rile you up even harder. When the very ends approaches, euphoria sets in. You’re alright with it being over, because unlike a solid tongue-raping or a NYE party, there’s a very good chance that if you play it note-for-note, one more time, you’d get the same, strong fuck-yeah reaction that you just did. 

The above White Stripes’ song is what’s doing that for me currently. It came on shuffle during a road trip a few months ago, and at least once a week ever since, I get this sudden urge to hear it. Right. Now.  

A sample of other found-via-shuffle surprises that have recently moved me to dramatics in the car, kitchen or otherwise:

1. “A Small Victory” - Faith No More

2. “I Wanna Be Adored” - The Stone Roses

3. “Rococo” - Arcade Fire

4. “Is She Weird” - Pixies

However, if this was a list from 10 years ago, I’d have to admit the following:

Yup, Coldplay. (Side note: Is the mistaken “!” in the song title a “warning, abort” type of marking or “yeah, this song is as ridiculous as a teenage girl”?) When “Trouble(!)” was popular, I was 24, lonely and in need a soundtrack for my unrequited crush. Leave me be.  

A not-so secret: I was a pseudo goth in college.

I wasn’t into garish makeup, nipple jewelry or public-display bondage. Nor did I mope around any more than a normal, pained 19-year-old does. (I grew up in Hawaii for chrissakes.) But I did sport patent-leather boots, own a few long black skirts, and had my hair cut into a drastic triangle bob for awhile. Draping myself in uncomfortably warm clothing was just your typical teenage advertisement of “I don’t belong here.”

The other day when I acknowledged my goth past during a random conversation, a friend who I’ve known only few years was surprised. And I can understand why: I smile a lot. I laugh at shit that isn’t even funny. Once, to my dismay, I was actually called perky. 

My sunny-goth paradox only speaks to my lack of full commitment to a specific role. (Disclosure: I was also a pseudo punk, a pseudo boho, and a generic all-around alternative kid. Again, this was Hawaii and we didn’t have much reference for the nuances between genres; they were all just “different” and required daily trips to Goodwill.) Aside from the “making a statement” purpose, I did things because I liked doing them, and more than anything else at 20 years old, I liked spinning around and flailing my arms in a burgundy dress to Peter Murphy, amped up on a few rum cocktails. 

These days I rarely go out dancing anymore. I have to work Friday mornings and usually spend Friday nights catching up with friends over beers, having actual conversations. But if you opened up my closet right now, you’d be swimming in a sea of black pants and boots. Too much color on my body still makes my uneasy, and if Sisters of Mercy came on at the bar, I’d probably push you out of the way to do some body swaying. 

(Above: 1998, the year I went as a dark fairy, whatever the hell that is, for Halloween.)

My flat iron broke right before my 34th birthday, which made me start to rethink my entire life. I usually don’t get too riled up about piling on another year, but the fitzing out of my most prized beauty tool was somewhat of a PTSD trigger, a flashback to a time when said straightener was bait in a slippery-slopey path to a strange-sort of adulthood.

See, when I turned 30, my boyfriend at the time and I didn’t have any money. I was in grad school, living off of student loans, and he was just getting started with a full-time sales job, (i.e. his first full-time, non-bartending job). He showed up for my monumental 3-0 with a card. Sensing my disappointment (“Dude, you only bought me a card?”), he offered to take me to Macy’s. For some reason they had given him a line of credit, and I could buy whatever I wanted, he said, though that line of credit was almost maxed out.

I was confused about what to purchase. First of all, Macy’s is a bit scag. Unless we’re talking Herald Square Macy’s on 34th Street and all of its 10 floors, the department chain has been looking more and more Penney’s and less and less Thanksgiving Day parade grandeur for years. But I can find something to buy at a Nascar convention, so this wasn’t the issue; the bigger problem was I wanted to buy something to signify my transition into full-fledged adulthood. 

I decided a mah-ture woman needed a scent. What the department store lacked in fashionable clothes and floors that weren’t layered in industrial carpet, it made up for in aisles and aisles of perfume bottles. Hillary Duff came in four flavors; Paris Hilton in three. They all smelt like bubblegum vaginas. Liz Taylor’s musky, dusty Diamonds weren’t much better. My nostrils started to burn and I began sneezing all over a cutout of Britney humping a tree of magnolia blossoms. I settled on Beverly Johnson just ‘cause.

But I still wasn’t satisfied. My new fragrance didn’t seem like it would give me the confidence of a 30-year-old who believed that grad school would make her into Susan Orlean or that her six-year relationship was headed somewhere. “Get something else,” my boyfriend suggested. 

I thought about the usual suspects—a new pair of boots, a slutty top I’d never wear dancing—but I wanted a good investment, something I wouldn’t spent money on in my 20s. That’s when I saw the Conair titanium platinum series straightening iron. “Okay, I’m done,” I said snatching it up.

As I stood in line holding two products that I never even wanted before I’d walked into this store and didn’t care if I walked out with, listening to Linda Ronstadt on Muzac, and staring at racks of cargo pants across the way, I wondered how did I get to this point? I’m in a store that makes me itchy, forcing the man who became my boyfriend because we made out at the Christmas party to pay 17 percent interest on what were essentially toiletries, all to make me feel a certain type of grown up!

That’s when the hissy fit happened. “Whyyyy are we hereeeeee!!!” I whined. He bitched, I bitched, he sucked, I sucked. He paid for the gifts and said he was walking home. 

Fast-forward to four years later. I’m turning 34 and no longer in that relationship. It ended shortly after I plugged in that straightening iron for the first time and made some choices. But with the iron dead in front of me, I wasn’t sure what to make of its passing, or more importantly, what to make of my inability to easily replace its $80-ness. I hadn’t even freelanced enough in August to cover my gym bill; I still wasn’t writing “Talk of the Town”s. I took my frizzy hair out into the humidity and went to Rite Aid. 

My current and future boyfriend was coincidentally with me on this errand, and while I was deciding between the Conair $18 and the Conair $24 option, he came up and asked me if I wanted a travel toothbrush. We were going to Maine in a few weeks. Not really, I said, thinking that was another $4 I had to waste.

“It comes in a pack of two. I was going to get it, silly.” 

“Oh, in that case.”

I walked up to the counter and paid cash for my $18 iron. It works just as well as the last one; hell, it even heats up faster. I rarely used it when we went camping in Maine a few weeks later, though both of us were happy I had that matching toothbrush.

1. Prepare for lethargy by drinking too much wine the night before.

2. Hide his ukulele.

3. Strategize what to eat first from the three bags full of groceries brought home by boyfriend. 

4. Have cookies for lunch, followed by after-lunch cookies.

5. Put off watching the latest episode of “Jersey Shore” (aka the dangling carrot) as long as possible. 

6. Waste 10 minutes discussing who should go out for more cookies before it’s too late, only to succumb to laziness brought on by full-cookie tummy.

7. Watch “Jersey Shore.”  

8. Nap. 

9. Come up with ideas for revising the 48-hour, anti-climatic storm coverage, broadcast on every single network channel. For example, turn it into an extended “Saturday Night Live”/Letterman-type extravaganza, hosted by Joan Rivers, John Stewart or Busta Rhymes or some combination there-of, with musical guests and improv bits—relegating all reporter-on-the-street-in-the-rain coverage to ten minutes per hour, maximum, which is then made fun of by Rivers and company.

10. Eat half a bag of chips and salsa.

11. Formalize #10 and make nachos for dinner. 

12. Spend 20 minutes trying to agree on something to watch on Netflix Instant.

13. Repeat #12 every hour-and-a-half to two hours. 

14. With hangover diminished but not to the point where the six-pack in the fridge looks alluring, fall asleep on the couch by 9:30.

15. Go in for extended morning snuggling.

16. Go in for extended morning (i.e. not workday morning) foreplay.

17. Make like Kool and the Gang, and get down on it.

18. Eat breakfast in phases: 1) coffee; 2) eggs, english muffin, more coffee; 3) banana.

19. Laugh at farts. 

20. Remember and delight in the propelling action made by toenails being clipped, as several strays accidentally (then purposely) fly into boyfriend’s lap. Then watch un-amusement wash over his face. 

21. Successfully convince boyfriend to help clean the apartment. 

22. Unsuccessfully convince boyfriend to clean out the spare closet.

23. Send each other emailed photos of creepy animals while indulging in mutual laptopping. 

24. Listen to the quiet of “the eye.”

25. When Bloomberg finally declares us free from our cages, become both overwhelmed with possibilities—go for a run? or for a bodega run to make mimosas?—and disappointed that the forced staycation is over without having had the chance to beat boyfriend at Scrabble. 

Once upon a time, I lived in Portland, Oregon, land of the ported and docked penis. There, in the young progressive capitol of America, men are too modern to leer and the mood is aloofness. Libidos are stifled further by the unrelenting greyness that looms overhead everyday, causing people to drink hand-crafted beers, which can often ignite a dulled libido, but can hinder satisfying one, too.  

In other words, it’s hard for a lady to get a compliment on her ass in Portland.

That is why when I moved to New York, I welcomed the long gazes and “hey mamas, yous lookin’ good” I received on my walks to the train. After three-years of practicing and participating in inoffensiveness, it was refreshing to be some place where it’s acknowledged that we humans are indeed shameless sexual beings. 

Don’t mistake my thank-you smirks and blushing cheeks for disillusionment, however; a “hey mami” is by no means an indicator that I’m a beauty queen or shoo-in for a J-Lo body double. Nor do I think that I’m unique; I know that four girls after me will get hollars in the next ten minutes, too. But it’s a compliment nonetheless, a showing of appreciation that  yeah, I try. I went to the gym today and I thought this skirt looked cute on me. Thanks for noticing.

That said, the charm of catcalls tends to wear off faster in the summer. When I’m all bundled up and some dude turns his head muttering “mmm mmm,” he’s working harder to imagine what I’m strutting under my poufy coat. In the summer, however, when its nearing 100 degrees outside and you’re wearing the shortest, lightest things you own so not to drown in your own sweat, the stares are a little too piercing. I get it; it’s nice to see skin again (guys with tats!) and you want to take it all in before its concealed in four months. But there’s a bit too much hunger in men-of-the-streets’ eyes during a NY summer, like they were all just pardoned from Rikers and forgot that there’s this thing called the internet where you can look at naked chicks all day, all year long.

I guess what I’m trying to say is I want it both ways - notice me, but don’t creep me out, dudes. Which is the same as saying, yeah, I’m a woman. 

I recently read a piece in New York magazine that said the “central tenet” of actress/writer/director Miranda July’s art is that she believes “openness and honest emotion trump cleverness and snark.”

This quote stuck out to me for several reasons. One: it pinpointed my wonky feelings about July. I’ve always liked her work—the few short stories I’ve read and her film Me and You and Everyone We Know were very true to life and its peculiarities—but there has always been something about her as a person, in interviews and as an influence in those works, that makes me uncomfortable—her gosh darn sincerity, and more so because she doesn’t apologize or hesitate for it. Like if I asked her how she can be so freakin’ sincere, she’d say, “What’s wrong with sincerity?” and mean it. No blinking, no winking.

And two: It felt like that statement was a direct jab at my tenet. Am a less honest person because I’m fluent in snark and cynicism (as noted in why she bothers me so)?

Well, let me try things Miranda’s way and be sincere about my tenet. I am a self-deprecator because I care what others think of me and people usually like jokes. Jokes go over much better than self pity, which is what I’d really like to indulge in most mornings as I lay in bed checking Facebook updates, torturing myself about not going to the gym and dreading having to inspire students who need inspiring. I believe laughing at myself is the answer to most of my insecurities and poor decisions because it is my hope that others will laugh with me instead of find me moany and boring. Boring is the worst thing I could imagine being. A person who takes herself too seriously comes second.  

Now, let me be sincere about sincerity. To me, sincerity means letting yourself off the hook from time to time. To survive, I have to let loose, I have to be silly, sometimes I have to put up a wall of smiles when I don’t want to or pour an extra drink when I shouldn’t because being an open receptacle to everything that’s around me is draining, exhausting and anxiety-making. I’m a sensitive person for whom depression and neurosis can easily be triggered, but I don’t get off on it. I don’t thrive by making art from it. If it happens, it happens, but I prefer to be an affable, likable person in my everyday life, someone who’s trying to hold on to perspective. And living in everyday life’s complexities and imperfections means I’ve become more open and more guarded, more hopeful and more cynical. 

And finally let me be sincere about Miranda July (and bring it on home). When I Googled images of July and got 20 similar expressions to the one above, I snickered. It’s hard for me to believe that after 37 years of living, she can still make unaffected doe eyes like that; I believe maybe she wants to be that uber sincere person, maybe she thinks she is that person, but no, it’s impossible to be 100 percent genuine, no motives, no walls, 24/7. This is my experience and often I like to project my experience onto others because picking apart things and trying to make sense of them is what I do. It may also mean that I like to digress and make up logical excuses to ease the scrutiny off of myself and my own choices. Right now I’m PMSing, which has aided in completing this exercise and giving it an emotional edge. Hormones are no joke. 

Here’s what I’ve not been doing lately: writing. I, for the first time in a few years, have been working too much, which means I now have money to go away for a weekend and entertain a guest, things that have also kept me busy in the last month. But this also means that most other nights, I struggle to stay awake past 10 for the sole purpose of not wanting to waste valuable hours when I’m not at work.

Which has lead to being disgruntled about working too much and thoughts about how I can do less for more pay. New spare moments are now spent thinking about jobs I can apply for and making lists of how to boost my careers—my journalism career that I’ve neglected for a bit, the author career I keep hoping to have, and my teaching career so I can one day work anywhere in the world (ahem Hawaii or from a South American bungalow) and be that famous journalist/author too. But usually these lists are comprised of things to distract me from writing, like donating the bag of clothes still sitting in the corner of my room and buying lemonade for the emergency vodka cocktail I’ll need later in the week.

Which explains why I haven’t blogged or written anything new, or even old, in the last month. Obviously, not writing makes me feel unbalanced—I know if I pushed the lists aside and wrote something, anything, I’d feel better. But here’s the weird thing about not writing: it makes me want to write even less. The thought of starting something new is daunting. It’s like going out on a date with a guy that’s kinda cute and not a total loser, i.e. doing something reasonable. You know that if you go, you may start to get invested and the thought of putting energy into something again is terrifying and time consuming and emotionally draining. You start to visualize the rough patches you’ll hit. You may want to give up. But you already invested! Do you keep on going, struggle to untangle the mess that’s already in place, or let go? And c’mon, when have you ever learned when to let go?

In other words, it’s a worthless mindfuck. Somehow you forget that you can walk away if this first date/draft sucks. You forget that the new part is the best part. You’re going in unattached and heading into something uncharted. You can be messy and random and wrong. Dig into things you really shouldn’t because you can shut your eyes, ears, legs, laptop and walk away.

Alright, I think I’ve psyched myself up. Maybe. 

I’ve written a bajillion words about my mother, many of them composed and over-composed, all of them furiously typed, deleted, then typed again in an attempt to tell our story, my story of who I am through knowing her. 

This is, and has been, a daunting task, one that I’m never sure I’ll get right as memories shift with maturity, perspective and often, lately, a reprieve from having to write about them at all. It is in this break from “examination” that I’ve realized that I all had to do to channel my mother was stand in front of a stove. 

When I was growing up, a typical dinner in my mother’s house was chicken (cooked in the microwave) with some sort of easy sauce (usually from a mustard-colored packet or by mixing ketchup with shoyu) and rice (made by directly pouring a cup of rice into a cooker, adding water and pressing the “cook” button). When my mother married my stepdad, upon his request, frozen vegetables were added to the repertoire, though they never made it to my plate or my mother’s. 

Now that I am co-habitating and sharing cooking duties with my man (i.e. no longer making meals out of frozen fake-meat products, cans of soup, crackers and dip tubs), I feel compelled to actually cook things that are reasonable dinner items (i.e. things that my boyfriend thinks are reasonable dinner items), like a protein, a starch and something green and healthy looking. Last Thursday’s menu included chicken drowning in a sauce described on the bottle from which it came as “Tastes from India,” served with, you guessed it, rice (cooked on the stove though!) and asparagus (at my boyfriend’s insistence—to me, all this creates is another pan to wash and adds an extra few minutes to when I actually get to eat).

I used to give my mom shit for her rudimentary, sometimes rubbery, dinner choices; I knew that other kids, with other mothers, were getting homemade tomato sauce for their spaghetti and pot roasts on Sundays. Now, however, I get it. After working all day, all I want to do is walk through the door and get to the point where I can decompress. Comfortably. But first, I have to eat. Cooking is not a meditative exercise; it’s a means to get food into my belly, my blood sugar levels back to normal and thus my mood resembling amicable so my boyfriend and I can converse outside of grunting and muttering “uh”s.

The last two meals I’ve made were sloppy joes and BLTs—also quick, also from my mother’s recipe box, also things that make me happy for those two reasons. Sometimes the zen after a long day comes dripping with mayonnaise, wrapped in bacon and smattered with nostalgia. 

(Above: My mother, not in a kitchen.)

I’ve been fortunate to have met a lot of good people in my life. Wiseasses, creative freaks, the smartest of smarty pants, and my favorite: down-to-earth, genuine muthafuckers. And I’ve been alive long enough to know that friendships are more flexible and forgiving than romantic relationships—you can fall in and out and back again, sometimes when you least expect it—but that, like a relationship, as you get older, you have an easier time spotting a good candidate (of which there are less of) right away and that you date him/her, not just choose any proximate schmuck to get smashed and let loose with. You take the coffees, the dinners, the staying at home with a bottle of wine slow to build on something good.

Some friendships are about time and place; they have an expiration date and need to be let go. And others are limited from the start and that’s fine as long as you don’t expect a non-emoter to cry with you over spoonfuls of peanut butter and Cap’n Crunch or a professional-responsible type to talk smack with you until last call has indeed been called. And then there are the rare friends that get you. YOU. Black, white, green, speckled, hyper, neurotic, sentimental, messy hands-eating you. And after living in four cities in eleven years you also realize that just because that person may end up living miles away, it doesn’t mean the friendship ends. It just means you appreciate them more, quirks and all, and that a frienaissance is inevitable. 

Pertaining to post below, let’s be honest. This is 2011. How most of us choose to waste our time is by browsing the Interwebs. 

For the last week, however, my boyfriend and I have been without our worldwideweb crutch. As we wait for our new router to arrive, we’ve turned to the old school moving-picture box for post-work, mind-numbing entertainment: the television.

Full disclosure: I like cable—I like cable so much that I don’t want to be tempted to watch crap when I could be reading or exercising, or, lord forbid, writing. So in an attempt to do my part as a holier-than-thou hipster (i.e. broke ass), I stopped paying for cable years ago. I do, however, watch a ton of Bravo, VH1 and MTV reality shows online. 

Which brings us back to the present: an Internet-less and cable-free apartment. It didn’t us take more than an hour of empty diddling before we pulled out an old antenna to see what was on regular network television.

This one single move opened my eyes to what I hope is not a reflection of what America likes, but what network execs think Americans like. Network TV is not just bad, it’s utterly, terribly mundane. If it was a color it would be beige. Or cement. 

Please don’t tell me that we Americans really are simple schmoes that don’t demand more out of our visual escapism than cliched sitcoms and detective shows. People argue that reality shows are exploitive, sad and degrading, but at least they’re worth debating and get a reaction. I laugh when I watch the “Jersey Shore” and gasp when I watch a Beverly Hills housewife spend $60,000 on her preschool daughter’s birthday party. These fame whores’ fame whoreness is fascinating, whatever their motive, however contrived. What I don’t understand is how anyone at the office water cooler would want to earnestly discuss the genius of: 

1. “The Big Bang Theory” - In this show, Blossom’s Mayim Bialik and Darlene’s love interest from “Roseanne” (which, by the way, was a great smartass sitcom) are nerds struggling to maintain their nerdom in this cool, hip, socially perplexing world. To us sardonic teens of the ’90s, this sounds promising, or at least intriguing, right? Wrong. It tries oh-so-very hard to be funny, but like it’s premise, it is awkward and obvious. For example, the female nerd (Blossom)—and how can you tell she’s a nerd? She’s got a middle hair part and a snort!—is turned on by —hold your horses—a hot, muscly guy! Cue the laugh track! Her nerd friend concludes, “This sounds like, mmmm, errr, sexual arousal.” Insert more recycled laughter from Urkel jokes. After 20 minutes of this I imagined Snookie and The Situation storming in, whisking them all away to Karma and showing them how caricatures can still be off-handed, slightly complicated, and most importantly, fucked, not just aroused. 

2. Any morning show - How does one, at 7 in the morning, sit down in front of the television with a cup of coffee and listen to all that phony, cheery, utterly fucking boring banter? “It’s national coffee cake day!” “Did you hear, Sue, our producer, made us some coffee cake back there and I can’t wait to get my hands on it!” “Yes, it’s huge! I saw it!” “How huge, Jim?” “Bigger than the zucchini we had for national ‘be a vegetarian for a day’ day!” “Hahahaha.” Mug sips. “Yes, much bigger! “And more tasty!” “Count me in on this holiday, Jim!” “Me too, Steve.” “Hahahahaha.” More mug sips. More mugging. Christ, I’ve heard wittier exchanges over Hostess cupcakes at the corner bodega. 

3. “NCISSI Bang Bang Doom-de-Doom Gavel Gavel Forensics” - Okay, I’ve barely watched any of these police detective shows but I can only assume people like them because there are so goddamn many on the air. The only way I can tell them apart is that when one is set some place tropical like Hawaii or Miami, everything is bright and saturated. Ray-Bans are mandatory for viewing. When it’s in a tough metropolitan city, like New York, however, shots are gritty and on the street. People wear coats and walk fast. Perpetrators lurk in alleys or in heroin tenements, unlike in the tropics, where detectives wear short-sleeve collared shirts, usually orange, and catch bad guys on beachwalks and from outdoor cafes where all the tables have matching umbrellas. 

In conclusion, this week without choice, without the glorious Internet and all its thousands of videos and bootleg shows, has made me realize that I do have standards. Even when I am a lazy loaf. 

When you move in with someone you love, you don’t learn anything fundamentally new about this person. What you do learn is what they do when you’re not around. When no one’s around.

Naturally, you tend to be a little hyper-aware of this down time during these first few days of cohabitation. You feel you should look semi-productive, engrossed or entertained during those hours between dinner and bed, the spare three you have on a Saturday afternoon and those fifteen minutes in the morning that you usually masturbate but now can’t because it’s rude. 

Years ago I was traumatized when I moved in with an old boyfriend and we were both out of work and he spent most mornings lazing about, shamelessly watching Sports Center. At least I had the audacity to shield my time-wasting and MySpace trawling from behind a computer screen and the guise I was applying online for jobs. 

Now though, I’m meta-aware of these moments—I’m aware of being aware of them but I’m also aware that being aware makes me look like an overanalytical, annoying killjoy, which therefore means I’m trying to just let them be. Pass in their normal, everyday way.

It helps that so far, my boyfriend’s futzing preference is to pick up his guitar and learn the chords to “Patience” or “Sweet Child O’Mine.”  

(Above: Also learned when you move in together—the combination of each other’s questionable eating habits. Note mint chocolate chip cookies, fiber-filled old-man Grape Nuts and faux chicken nugs.)

As a journalist, I’ve often been interested in how a city defines, or how it molds, the people that live within it. How the two become symbiotic. How they become symbols for each other.

An example: New York City. I’m on a crowded train into Manhattan on a Monday morning. In the middle of the car is a rather large pocket of standing space. I make my way over and grab the metal pole above my head. Two teenage girls sit loosely on the seats in front of me. One has short, coarse Ronald McDonald red hair spiked with Sunkist orange tips. A tiny samurai ponytail holds onto whatever strands can be gathered up top. Her eyes are closed, her mouth is half open, her head rolls in jerky, gravitational swings, guided by the course of the train. The other young lady is swathed in a hoodie, bent over, head dangling between her Carhartt legs. Sharpie squiggles cover her right hand.

For a fleeting moment I think “Really? That’s why no one’s standing here? People are weirded out by these two?” We all, on any given day, on any given train, have seen much worse.  

The train comes to a stop. Ronnie’s head practically hits the pole to her side and Ms. Hoodie lurches forward. Peeking out from M.Hood’s lap is a bag of imitation Doritos. It dawns on me. They could puke at any moment. 

That is what separates a New Yorker from a non-New Yorker. Experience. Preventive measures against inconvenience. A collective sizing-up of a situation without saying a word, without gesturing that anything is indeed a big fuckin deal. 

My students often try to guess how old I am. Most of them are a handful of years younger than me, others are closer to my age. I don’t wear khakis or corduroy, nor do I shop at Talbotts, so it’s understandable my age confuses them since their standard reference is Mr. Chang, the information systems instructor whose shoes have buckles and whose flip phone is always clipped to his leather belt. 

Not to mention, I, “call me Jessica, not Miss Machado,” am often prone to swearing and bunking the Establishment (college included), which aligns me with the Us team, comprised of working class immigrants and students from the Bronx, versus the Them team, the old authoratative bunch.

Or, most likely, I’m on the Whitey team, a general mishmash of out-of-touch fair-skinned folk. 

Nevertheless, as much as I’d like to think my youthful appearance is compromised only by my radiating maturity, I’m slowly realizing that this is not the case. My eyes—the lines, the ballooning sacs, the constant “don’t you even try to get that shit past me” look within them—give me away. I’m afraid the question my students are asking isn’t “how old are you?” but “why does this old person, who should make more money than I do, own the same flouncy shirt from Target that I bought four years ago?”

Then the other day my suspicions were confirmed when a student made an attempt to guess my age. “Thirty-four?” he asked.

Usually, the age discussion doesn’t get past the initial question, as I will shake my head, utter “not saying,” and get back to the lecture on whether Miley Cyrus’ latest Twitter photo is or is not pornography.

Puncturing my ego further, recently, a random group of strangers, single men in a dimly lit bar have you, affirmed the truth. For some reason, my girlfriend decided to survey them on how old we look. One looked me square in the eye. “Thirty-three,” he said.

So I suppose I’m the last to know that I’ve been fooling no one. For the past three years, I thought I was able to pass for a twentysomething without having to deal with the insecure, humorless garbage of actually being twentysomething. Dammit. Now I’m starting to wonder if it was the reverse all along: it wasn’t my appearance that made people question my age, but my behaviors.

I guess this means I’m finally acting like a bona fide real adult. A real adult who won’t just stare at a keyboard full of crumbs left over from her tortilla-chip breakfast, but an adult who’ll clean dust it off as soon as she finishes her blog post.