put these on, i’ll show you how i want my onions chopped

i want to feed you; can i feed you? come over, just let me feed you.

urban survival tips for the modern woman

It’s a tough world out there, ladies.

And to help you navigate through whatever concrete jungle your dreams are made of, I have compiled a list of handy advice-nuggets ranging from personal safety, to avoiding the unwanted advances of a male stranger, to mitigating everyday instances of social awkwardness.  The following are tried and tested methods - take them with a grain of salt, however: I’m nobody’s Carrie Bradshaw and have a knack for getting myself in tricky situations, from the violent to the cripplingly uncomfortable. 

Here we go:

Life’s more fun if you only find yourself attractive on weekends.  Okay, so you might have great bone structure, or a nice rack, or long, shiny hair or whatever, and that’s been working out well for you so far, Miss Twenty-Something-Lady-Person.  Good job, good genes. Here’s the thing, though: from Monday to Friday afternoon that shouldn’t matter, and you should act as if the world is just one big ‘Bad Taste’-themed costume party.  Act silly, trip over things, bust a move on the street, wear weird clothes.  Do strange things just because you think it’s funny.  The world needs more women who aren’t afraid to make a fool of themselves in broad daylight.  TODAY YOU ARE THE WEIRDEST LOOKING PERSON IN THE WORLD AND THAT IS AWESOME.  Act accordingly. 

The secret to avoiding getting hit on in undesirable circumstances or bothered during your commute is all about facial expressions and body language. 

If you don’t feel safe on the metro at night because there’s a suspicious guy looking at you, salivating, as if you’re a rotisserie chicken, just fake a facial tick.  Blink a lot, shrug your shoulders ever few seconds, violently scratch your scalp, chew on your arm-hair.  Alternatively, blow your cheeks up with air and then gently slap your face until they deflate.  Either are equally unattractive and will effectively function as a social suit of armor. 

Also, you know those tough-looking guys who walk with their arms stretched out in a noticeable distance to their armpits, as if they have too much upper-body strength that their arms have stopped bending in the right ways?  If you’re ever by yourself at night in a dodgy area and don’t feel safe, walk like that.  Imagine you have a soda can under each armpit, and look really angry (or sad; that’s even more confusing).  You’ll either seem really jacked and no one will want to mess with you, or as if you have a problem with Armpit Chafing - which is very unattractive and possibly contagious.  So you’re good.

Lastly, I’ve observed that I’ve never been bothered while I’m eating on the go, so I usually carry an apple or a cracker in my jacket pocket.  I think it’s because I have a really primal, almost rabid, look on my face when I eat, so people know not to even go there. 

Learn what a drug deal looks like, and get over it.  There is always a time and place for shameless gawking; drug deals are not one of them, no matter how homesick for your college-town/crack-capital-of-the-world Baltimore, Maryland they make you.  If you find yourself by the Fontaine des Innocents in Les Halles at night, for instance, keep walking, use the armpit defense, and avoid making eye-contact with anyone wearing sports-gear. 

Alternatively, however - if you keep an appropriate distance and know the right moment to walk away - street fights (in well-lit areas!) can serve as a relatively safe alternative in the realm of urban street theater.  I was on a run by Place de Clichy once and saw a man and a woman (who were presumably on a date, as it was outside the big movie theater) get into a full-out brawl.  She threw the first punch, he retaliated, she came back with an even greater force.  A man tried to intercede, which changed the dynamics dramatically: while at first it seemed like this Kind Stranger would succeed in breaking up the fight, the former sparring partners then joined forces against the good Samaritan - deriding him for his well-meaning intervention - and started taking turns trying to beat him up, rather than each other.  It was kind of romantic in a weird way, and I had front-row seats, albeit from the other side of the street.

Make friends with the bouncer of at least one nightlife establishment. I don’t go out enough for this to ever happen to me and feel far too awkward when I do, but from what I observe from people much cooler than I, it seems like a very smart thing to do. 

Be nice to homeless people.  You never know when you’re going to get punched in the face. 

Never accidentally give your neighborhood kebab guy Israeli currency.  I did this last week.  He gave me a suspicious look, and when I realized my geopolitical faux pas I tried to cover it by saying, “Oh, ha-ha sorry I didn’t realize I still had my Japanese Yen in my wallet.  Tokyo.  Business…trip.  Technology?  Extra harissa on my fries s’il vous plaît….?” 

Never give your number out to anyone you meet in a bar.  Sure, he may be charming and well-dressed and have his scooter parked outside, but this is never a good idea.  I have only done this once, when I met this French-Moroccan guy we’ll just call “Pants,” at a bar during the World Cup Finale two summers ago.  He seemed cool enough: had a Lenny Kravitz vibe going on, with nice hair and caramel-colored skin, and was a couture tailor, specializing in pants.  After a summer of unprecedented success with men, I figured I was on a winning streak so one date with a stranger wouldn’t do any harm, and the whole pants angle would make for a good story.  I obliged his invitation to a picnic by the Seine with his co-workers - it laid-back and fun enough such that seeing him again seemed like a benign proposition.  However….

Our second date largely consisted of Pants telling me that he wanted to make me his Moroccan queen, coupled with unprompted outbursts of, “YOUR EYES! YOUR LIPS! YOUR HAIR!”  After that I stopped returning his (ten) phone calls and (fifteen) texts (a day), and when we crossed paths one Sunday afternoon in the Marais he tried to run me over on his Vespa. 

Once in a while I’ll meet someone interesting when I’m out with my friends, and he’ll seem attractive and have a nice smile and think my jokes are funny, but then I am taken back to the Pants ordeal, and see the fury in his eyes as he sped towards me on rue Vieille du Temple - falafel balls falling tragically on the ground as I tried to flee the scene - and I suddenly remember my fake boyfriend Jamal, who is a dentistry student in Ohio.  I put my phone away.  He’s a very jealous man.

Don’t shit where you eat.  This is the best advice anyone could ever give you, and it really does behoove you to heed it.  Believe me: I’m the expert on romantic endeavors gone awry, avoiding confrontation, and generally lacking social grace.  Think your co-worker or classmate or bartender at your favorite spot around the corner is cute?  Don’t.  Stop it.  Walk away.  Basta.  Seriously, just…just shut it down right now.  It’s not going to work out, you will embarrass yourself somehow in the aftermath, and then you’re going to have to quit your job or drop out of school or go out of the country if you ever want to get a drink again.  I have several examples from my personal life about such ill-fated entanglements but reliving them makes me want to rip my skin off and live in a white, noiseless box for the rest of my life so I’m just going to ask you to take my word for it. 

When in doubt, yawn.  If you ever don’t know what to say on an elevator or passing by someone you vaguely remember from a Social Event in the halls of your university, just smile and yawn.

They will say, “Oh, you must be tired,” or “Ha-ha, are you tired?” which opens up an opportunity to project yourself as either a Very Hard Worker or a Sociable Young Person - whatever impression you’d like to put forth.  You can reply with something like, “Oh yeah, late in the evening with the young people… last night… man, you know how that goes,” or, “Up late with that paper…exam… books and things.  Intellectual endeavors… Whew!  Smart.  Are you tired from anything?”  The choice is yours. 

That’s all I got for now, friends - it’s Saturday and I’m going to a Very Fancy Gala at the Musée d’Orsay as a Member Of The Press.  Follow me on my twitter for live updates.  I’m going sans-date, not knowing a soul, which means this should be interesting, champagne-fueled, possibly disastrous, and there will be lots to write about for later…

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last week’s iphone poetry

THE WIND BROUGHT GOD IN; HE MADE DINNER

The shuk smells like cumin, fresh tomatoes, lemon grass;
Chickpeas, paprika, sugared rugelach, bay leaves.
Like sweet-meets-savory, it smells fast:
On Your Way To Here/Getting Back From There —
Chik-chak mamaleh, we’re not
In the Diaspora anymore.

The shuk tastes like Old-Country Recipes:
With Yiddish words like nachas —
It’s all the earth you’ve never felt,
But you can lick its soil off your tongue.
It dances to the prayer of blended-accent beats:
“Baruch hashem may my senses last
Just as long as I do.”

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until i finish transcribing my notebook and make sense of the stories in my head

click for more photos of jerusalem

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the girls, old city, jerusalem

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bedtime

“Good night little one.  I love you more than the sky.”

“That’s bigger than me?”

“A lot bigger.”

“Bigger than you?”

“Oh yeah.”

“I love you more than seventy-two trucks, more than a city, I love you more than Singapore, more than Asia, I love you more than Paris, I love you more than boxes.  That’s bigger than me, that’s bigger than the sky.”

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bromances for advanced-beginners

You (and also your sidekick Gelston) have officially and effectively adopted the social norms and behaviors of a twenty-something male. Congratulations. Yours in cheap beer, endless and insipid movie quotations, and dirty underwear,

-Dave, King of the Bros(e)

It wasn’t until college that I had a close group of girlfriends. 

I went to the same private Jewish school from the age of 3 to 18, which, at times, was more of an incubator of stereotypical Semitic neuroses than it was a Prestigious Institution of Learning.  It was there, for the better part of my teenage years, that my circle of friends largely included a group of nerdy boys, most of whom I had known since elementary school. 

While our peers were out partying in Los Angeles nightclubs and their permissive parents’ guesthouses – experimenting with alcohol and most likely each other, the boys and I would congregate in Westwood Village to debate the rising price of oil worldwide and American foreign policy, or in one of our houses to play Henry Kissinger’s favorite board game, Diplomacy.  

Instead of acknowledging that I was a member of the fairer sex, my all-male group of friends referred to me fondly as “Mole-Rat,” and created fables and theme songs surrounding my mentally challenged, hairless rodent alter-ego, such as “Mole-Rat in the Big City,” a jazzy, up-beat number. 

Daniel even wrote a series of short stories starring a version of the Mole-Rat-Female, named ‘Po,’ a nickname I garnered from one time in 10^th grade when I just wrote “Po” instead of “Potassium” on a chemistry exam, as if I had fallen asleep in the middle of the word, or my attention had been suddenly captured by a shiny beaker in the corner of my eye.  For your enjoyment I’ve included a link from “Po the Third: The Escape,” the third installment, which dates back to 2007.  I really recommend that you read it (he’s funnier than I’ll ever be). 

The Boys taught me that love between friends is a wonderful, complex thing, and with men especially, you need a thick skin in order to endure the playful abuse that is just their way of expressing tenderness.  I think that with all good friendships you begin to develop a kind of vernacular, one that is so essential to the fabric of your bond you don’t realize it explicitly - filled with abstract allusions to shared experiences and inside jokes, the origins of which you can’t even remember - such that you might as well be speaking another language to an outsider. 

And especially with me living so far away from a majority of the people I love, at the end of the day it’s the across-oceans communication of that dialect which reinforces those bonds, forged in moments I now see as being defined by fleeting proximity. 

This all brings me to my dear friend Will, who I’ve been meaning to write about for all too long (sorry bro).  

Will and I met through our mutual friend and Will’s former housemate, Dave: the godfather of our particular vernacular and man responsible for coining the term “Brose” (my ‘bro’ nickname, which has since taken on a life of its own), as well as Laura’s, “Gelman,” a variation on the theme “Gelstein; Gelmanstein; Gelmanbro; Gelmanbromanstein.”  I was a tenant of their Georgetown rowhouse two nights a week while I was interning at USA Today; we initially got off on the wrong foot - the reasons for which will remain off the Internet (love you, man!) - until the fences were mended when Will nursed me back to health after I got a 24-hour vomiting bug.  

In a lot of respects, Will is everything that I am not: he is Disney-Prince Handsome and has a Very Impressive Job in Consulting – clean-cut and impeccably mannered, alum of an elite East-Coast boarding school, simultaneously athletic and intellectually refined.

I, however, am the goofy, outlandish sidekick who brings a balance to his sometimes White-Boy Square Tendencies – the id extraordinaire to his superego – what seems to be the theme with all of my close friends: we all are high functioning in one small area such that together we constitute one Real Person. 

Will came to Paris a couple of weeks ago and stayed with me; I hadn’t seen him since May when I went back to Baltimore for graduation, which was a joyful reunion filled with references to our favorite song, Love in Dis Club - undoubtedly the basis for the birth of our bromance, solidifying one of the foundations to our parlance. 

Accordingly, this is what a typical Skype conversation between us looks like:

“Yo Brose, what’s the best part of Usher’s R&B opus LIDC”

“YOU KEEP DOIN’ IT ON PURPOSE”

“WINDIN AND WORKIN IT”

“BABY CLOSE YOUR EYES AND IT’LL JUST BE ME AND YOU”

“OMG”

“OMG I KNOW RIGHT”

“BROSE we’re having a moment”

“Yeah man”

In a hilarious twist of fate, Will went downstairs to the men’s suiting boutique to buy a blazer (Thanks to divine providence, The Guy Who Works Downstairs no longer Works Downstairs - one less daily awkward interaction in the books for R.F.). The owner, Franck, much like many a Parisienne reduced to giggles in his presence, was taken with Will’s good looks and perfect French, told him that he was having one of his Fashion Parties in a few days, and asked if Will could model for the company’s website. Obviously I was excited at the prospect of my own personal redemption this relationship would provide in light of my foiled first impression with the establishment.

The only modeling experience I’ve ever had, on the other hand, was a few days ago when I was a stand-in for a photo-shoot starring my boss, so the photographer could test the lighting.  He told me to just stand still and look into the camera I told him I felt really awkward and didn’t know what to do with my hands, and then finally when I found the one faux-nonchalant stance I could achieve without looking like a sad White Rapper, I told him, “I’M SMIZING, CAN YOU TELL I’M SMIZING!!”

But it’s nice to know that our friendship is a two-way street: While my absurd misadventures do provide for good fodder to lighten up a Very Serious Workday in the District of Columbia, I’m also probably one of the few girls he knows who is formidable opponent in a seemingly violent play-fight outside La Perle at 2am (I still lost), can solve his romantic quandaries with a three-word email, “SHUT. IT. DOWN,” and clue him into the intricacies of pop-culture:

“Hey Brose, you know that voice modulation apparatus that rappers use?  What’s that called?”

“Auto-tune.  That was the whitest sentence I’ve ever heard in my life.” 

What’s great is that now we have our own eccentric mythology: made up of a melange of personal catchphrases and inside jokes, reiterated to each other on an almost daily basis via trans-Atlantic text message to “Deborah H.,” his name in my contact list, a relic from the days when we looked upon each other with general disdain rather than bromantical warmth. 

“I love you man,” I’ll send.  “In this club in this sandwich grec in this Disney Prince.”  “I love you too, Brose,” he’ll reply.  “In this club, in this club.”

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new feature: chastity’s hipstamatic photoroll

click for more silliness

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process/non-secrets

Sometimes you would ask me how I came up with the things I write about, which I tried to answer honestly, because it didn’t seem like a rhetorical question or an empty vessel of conversation; you were curious about it when I first told you that I liked to write, and then again when you read some of the things I wrote, when you said to me you thought they were beautiful.

So I told you about my process; how it always starts with a color, then a feeling, and finally a word or two drips down – until my head starts to feel heavy and my toes curl instinctively, and a sentence comes crawling out from the dark place in my mind where ideas float around like souls in the Styx.

And then something inexplicable comes along and triggers this magical combustion of all the elements, creating a singular story – a whole piece – that I don’t have to create so much as purge from myself: I retch and retch and finally shove some fingers down my throat, tickling my brain until every menacing drop of bile is extracted.

But what I didn’t tell you is that I come up with my best ideas when I’m on the run – one of the things I kept just to have a secret from you, even though I don’t keep secrets from anyone – which is why I like to sit on the Metro in the opposite direction of the train’s motion, so I can feel like I’m being pulled away from somewhere, to insert something vaguely tragic into the otherwise mundane.  I get that it’s silly and melodramatic: both the non-secret keeping and the strange rituals I have to desperately harvest ideas, especially in barren periods of the un-Dark – but this is how I harness my Crazy, my impulse to feel, and turn it into something productive.

Which is why you shouldn’t have held me so tight when I wanted to run away, and instead of escaping I held on to you too, until there were no colors or words and I felt dead inside. 

For the next few days I ran through all of the silent crevasses of Paris until I was brave enough for crowds.  I elbowed through the masses – instead of just putting my hands up to my face as wind came out behind corners – pushing through strangers with a force that should have been directed at you, to propel myself away when you gave me that last look, the one that said, “I’m ending this, whatever it has been,” but also, “I feel sorry for you.”

It made me thankful for my non-secrets, all of the little things I didn’t reveal to you – even though to everyone else, even people for whom I’ve felt less, my archives are open and intentions transparent.  Keeping secrets makes me feel sick inside, as if I’m living in a middle school science experiment: at the whim of a group of sinister adolescents with an amateur knowledge of the Elements and a desire to see their world up in flames.

So after that night, and during all of the running and the being pulled away from metro-stop to metro-stop, I tried to write a story, and I called it “Sitting Shiva, Watching the Pigeons.”  It was about a conversation I had with two friends the next day about how sad and foolish the whole thing made me feel, but it was awkward and ugly because I’m bad at writing dialogue – which is partly due to the fact that I was raised on films from the forties, so in my head everyone sounds like Cary Grant.  

I scrapped the story idea, so I wrote a few poems on my phone, and thought of all of the words that would sound good with “violence,” because that’s how I felt – cold-blooded and wiped clean with rage – when you wouldn’t let me go, so you could get your last look.

But none of my poems are really beautiful, anyway – they’re weird and stupid and filled with secrets that aren’t secrets: just little pins I put on feelings and time, like flags on a map, abstract references to my Being There to show off to myself the next time I go flipping through memories.  But I still write them because I think words are delicious – like duck confit dancing in fat, or a Granny Smith apple in late September, or hot sauce on anything.  Words make my mouth water; they make me grunt and wheeze, and I know how each one tasted as it left.

Then I took a walk in the glacial morning sunlight and I saw the right color and felt the right feelings and the cosmic benevolence that puts everything together commanded that I run home – right then – to go catch the idea before it dissipated back into the molten blackness of my river Styx.

I toyed with the idea of letting this story pass me by, to allow perhaps for a forgetting – so I could lose the words that I would have otherwise affixed to your eyes, your voice, your embrace: to lose the painted picture my words would make of that painful little minute.

But for those few moments, when the clouds came in and the story was right in front of me, weaving through raindrops, I could see right through you, straight into your darkness, even though I still don’t understand you at all.

And so I wrote it; or rather, it was extracted from me – as if the devil cut through the tender crease that links my thumb to my palm to get to the vein that bulges on the inside of my wrist.  He tugged and jiggled at it until it detached from my heart, and poured all of the coagulating life-essence onto the floor, scraping and scraping at the insides for hours, until it looked like a hollow, discarded tree branch.  

But I’ll never read it again or show it to anyone – it will be a Real Secret, something I’ve already abandoned so I can just keep running, which hopefully means I’ll never be out of ideas.

So that’s how it happens.  That is how I create something you might have thought was beautiful.

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