Whilst reading my dear friend caropal’s latest entry today, I was reminded of a day a couple of months ago upon which I wore a rather low-cut shirt to work and was very surprised to look down at one point and notice an unfamiliar mole on my chest. I spent the rest of the afternoon wondering how one could go her whole life with a dark black spot featured prominently on her front and never pay it any mind, and I became very concerned that I was missing other important features of my body. Like, say, an extra ear or mysteriously braided armhair.

I went home that night and stood in front of my mirror, just looking at the thing in unamused awe. Angry at it for confusing me, I took my fingernail and scraped at it, thinking it might be a weird scab of some kind. It came right off and left absolutely no mark behind, which confused me even more for a second before I remembered that I’d had some dark chocolate after lunch that day. I realized that a hunk of it must have melted and dripped onto my boob, where it lounged all day while my co-workers walked past it thinking, Wow, what slob.

So to enact revenge on it, I popped it in my mouth. Dee-lish.

This morning, the 4 train pulled up at Union Square, and those of us waiting on the platform made a little line on each side of the door closest to us to let passengers off first. When there are too many people wanting to get on, the line tends to clump up with overeager late-to-workers trying to weasel their way to the front, but this morning, there were only a few of us and therefore plenty of room to spread out. As I stood watching people file off, I felt something land against the back of my head and then move its way up to my crown (no, not my princess crown). At first, I thought that one of my friends might have spotted me and come to tousle my hair, but then I realised that anyone who knows me knows not to touch me in the morning, so I turned around with a scowl and saw that the guy behind me was holding one of those giant black Penguin volumes of the collected works of some supposedly-great author thisclose to my face. I realised that he had totally scraped the back of my head and then gone back to reading as if it was nothing.

My initial response was an incredulous “what the fuck!”, which I immediately felt guilty for, ’cause I wanted to give the guy the benefit of the doubt, and you can’t just go around what-the-fucking everyone who gives you a bump in a city so crowded. But then I saw that he was wearing headphones and

a) hadn’t heard me because of them, or
b) was using them as an excuse to pretend he hadn’t heard me.

He was too tall for me to see his eyes over his book to be sure, but given five more seconds to think about it, I would’ve without question and without pause

a) slapped the book out of his hand and onto the ground, hopefully bending some of the pages in the process,
b) yanked one of the earbuds from his head and what-the-fucked the hell out of his eardrum, or
c) tapped him gently on the arm to get him to lower the book and then PUNCHED HIM IN THE GUT.

But as the girl in front of me was entering the train, I felt the pressure to get on before the doors closed and decided to just let it go. Which is, you know, the mature thing to do. But I made sure to get on real slow-like to piss him off a little, because I’m not actually mature at all. I breathed deeply and tried to forget about him as I grabbed the pole in the middle of the train, but then he followed me to the pole, wrapped one arm entirely around it, leaned his body entirely against it, and smashed my hand entirely to the metal in a mass of wool coat and bag strap and bony twentysomething torso. He was one of these really perfect European-looking young guys with the hair so black it gleamed and the nose so sharp it could be used as a shiv in a pinch during a prison brawl, and I felt very aware of being short-haired and Chuck-Taylor-wearing and not at all the kind of girl he’d pay attention to. And to make matters worse, when he’d consumed the pole with his armpit, he’d done it with his back to me, so I was for all intents and purposes completely invisible to him.

I thought about stepping on his clunky black boots or tearing his armskin with my fingernails, but I figured that’d be too obvious. I wished that today had been one of the days when I was carrying a huge structured shoulder bag so I could turn around, take a step backward, and thrust the bottom corner so far into him that his spine would touch his ribs. And then turn back around and say, “OMG, I am so sorry,” in an obviously unsorry way. But since my mama didn’t raise me that way, I merely reasoned that assholes turn out assholes for a reason and that I no doubt lead a much happier life than he does. But I’m really hoping that he turned out an asshole because of some past anal rape. Ta!

In honor of Kanye’s enviable luminescent suit at the Grammys last night

I bring you this forgotten gem from my 2006 birthday dinner:

(Now I ain’t sayin’ I’ma golddigger
But I ain’t messin’ with no broke niggaz)

Neverminding the fact that it’s mostly ones he’s holding, I love that Kamran was doing stuff like this in our first month of dating.

Kamran calls this

Fear and Loathing in Union Square Station

As you may remember, Kamran’s landlady installed a murphy bed in his apartment over Christmas break, and we’ve been heartily enjoying it ever since. The landlady’s last name is Dicker, which makes for lots of hi-LAR-ious “Dicker? I hardly know ‘er!” jokes. And we’re also strangely amused by a sticker on the frame of the bed that says, “ST DICKER,” which we interpret to mean “St. Dicker” and can repeat to each other for minutes at a time.

But even better is that the murphy bed has allowed us what we call The Pillow Corner. The bed frame has a panel that runs parallel to the sleeper, and since the head of the mattress is against a wall, there’s this lovely place where the wall meets the panel and forms a corner, which we pile high with pillows and snuggle into. Kamran says that he sleeps in The Pillow Corner when I’m not there.

Of course, he also says that he fits pillows with my pajamas and cuddles them when I’m not there. Creepy or romantic? You decide.

And while we’re on the subject of beds, you can vote creepy or romantic on this, which is the photo that resulted from my wrapping Kamran in a papoose made of blankets on his birthday:

I seriously don’t think this relationship is abnormal at all.

A couple of Saturdays ago, my co-worker Sonya and her boyfriend, Adam, invited Kamran and me to our first night of bowling in New York. It was inside the super-sketchy port authority, so we were nearly-mugged and actually-raped approximately twenty times between the subway exit and the velvet ropes leading into the bowling alley, but there was a private lane and 176 ounces of beer awaiting us that made it well worth the pain and suffering.

Once we were inside, it wasn’t sketchy at all. There were people lounging around the round bar in the middle, and one whole side of the place had been made to look like a club with plush white seats and wispy white curtains hanging from the ceiling with little white lights all around. While we waited for our lane to become available, we stood near the racks of shoes with black and red size numbers on them, and Sonya gasped at a sign that read, “Black for men. Red for women,” thinking that it said, “For black men.” And then we made all sorts of segregation jokes.

We finally settled in our lane next to another double-date, and the two men in the party couldn’t stop looking at Sonya, which I enjoyed. Kamran and Adam jumped right into the game

but then got a little antsy when the beer took too long to arrive:

But when it did, it arrived IN A TOWER. And oh, the glory that ensued:

The greatest thing was that Sonya and Adam had absolutely no professional bowling form yet completely kicked our asses in the first two games. They’d grab some 15-pound balls, walk up to the line all calm-like, set the ball down with a gentle roll, and get strikes every time.

Meanwhile, I’d told Kamran at dinner beforehand that I have a bad habit of accidentally letting the ball go when my arm’s behind me and often end up flinging it back toward my resting opponents, and he’d suggested that I make a concerted effort to control that. So of course I did it on my very first turn.

Sonya and Adam were super-competitive and were cheering for each other’s every flub, but it was Kamran who proved the skilledest at drunken bowling and won the final game with the hearty score of 112. I think he was high on adrenaline from singlehandedly protecting the integrity of our beer tower from the grubby hands of a would-be thief. And by that, I mean that he told the guy, “Hey, uh, this is our beer,” and the guy backed off and said, “Oh, my bad.”

The tower was empty by 1:15, so we posed for some prom-esque pictures on the way out

and then did the robot all the way home.

My best friend Tracey and I think that her singing Radiohead’s “Creep” at an octave too high is hi-LAR-ious. You will likely just be horrified.