I think it’s pretty common to have a favourite stall in the bathroom, but I’m nearly obsessive about mine. I monitor who else is using it, which of the two toilet paper rolls is getting utilized more, what time of day it gets visited for the first time, and so on and so on. These things are especially important considering that I work next to an office of women who POOP ON TOILET SEATS.

It’s the perfect stall, too. The first one has the air vent in it, and while I appreciate a little noise while I’m doing my business, I can’t handle that there’s a huge space on the right side where everyone can look in and see you. The second one is too cramped. The third one is too spacious. The fifth one is handicapped, for God’s sake. And so I take the fourth. I used to try and play it cool and not use my special stall if someone was already in the third or fifth out of respect for their peeing privacy, but in my old age, I’ve come to care much more about my own comfort.

Anyway, the other day, I innocently went to my stall and found THE HUGEST PUBIC HAIR EVER CULTIVATED just lying there, sprawling across the whole seat. You can imagine my horror. And so I typed up the following sign in the biggest font possible:

I thought about adding something about taking a Weedwhacker to a bush but thought better of it, being intensely concerned about my professionality and all.

When I came back after lunch, I followed a woman down the hall who stooped to pick up the sign, which had been tossed to the floor. I thought it very apropos that these seat-smearing women would take down the sign but not take the extra two seconds to throw it away. The woman–who doesn’t seem to speak a lot of English–looked at the paper as if she was confused by it, so I said, “What an awesome sign,” and she stuck it back on the door without a second thought.

And so my legacy lives on.

Tell me the truth: would you date someone who was missing a finger?

Does it make a difference if, say, only a section of the finger was missing?

I spent most of my train ride this morning considering it, and I’m still not sure. On one hand, I’d really like to introduce people to my boyfriend by saying, “Barbara, this is my boyfriend Stan, and we can never get married because he’s missing his ring finger.” And whereas I call Kamran “Dr. Boyfriend” here, I could call this finger-lacking guy “Four-and-a-Half-Fingered Boyfriend”. It has a ring to it, right?

But on the other hand, I feel like we’d have to set way too many ground rules for a healthy relationship to ever develop. I’d constantly be saying things like, “Okay, you can touch me with your nub, but if it so much as comes within an inch of my mouth, I swear I’ll cut the other nine off.”

My dear Dr. Boyfriend has a series of uplifting catchphrases, my favourites being “everything’s coming up Kamran” and “it’s your world, squirrel”. For my birthday today, he sent me this:

And while I have no idea who invited the guy in the cowboy hat to my party, I appreciate the sentiment.

But I’ll tell you what–it’s rough having a birthday when you’re lactose intolerant. As you may remember, I’ve been working on becoming lactose tolerant, and while I do believe I’m making strides, what’s coming out of my bum today smells nasty. I keep running out of the bathroom as soon as I’m finished, because I don’t want to hang around and have to explain to my co-workers who weren’t in New Orleans with me this week, “I’m lactose intolerant, but there was an ice cream bar at lunch yesterday, and what was I supposed to do?! It’s my goddamned birthday!”

Last night, I cried when my portion of our karaoke bill came to $48.

This morning, I cried while watching an insurance commercial:

I’m about to leave to get my hair trimmed, and I really hope to cry during that, too.

With any luck, I’ll make a sobby scene during dinner tonight and get us kicked out of the restaurant.

Gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, HORMONES!

I used to be the lactose tolerant-est. I was raised to think there’s no point in eating a meal if you don’t follow it up with ice cream for dessert, that Dannon’s Fruit on the Bottom yogurt provided great surprises at every turn, and that chips simply don’t exist without nacho cheese. For the first 23 years of my life, I drank a glass of Nestle’s Quik for breakfast every morning, and to this day my dad still does, first stirring it loud enough to wake up everyone within a mile radius and then drinking it spoonful by spoonful.

During my last year of college, though, I cut out most of the ice cream so I could at least pretend to want to be healthy and started drinking soy milk because my family farm makes a pretty penny off soybean sales. And now I’m f-ig lactose intolerant. For a while I didn’t put two and two together, but now I recognise that the moment I put the smalled bite of /eks/ frozen yogurt in my mouth, I’m a burblinggurbling gas machine.

Sexy?

My co-worker who goes on week-long colon cleanses where she poos ten to twelve times per minute tells me that adults aren’t meant to process milk and that I should give it up, but I think that’s a load of horse hockey, and I’m now on a mission to make myself lactose tolerant again. I’ve been reading up on it, and apparently you can re-train your lower intestine to grow the right lactose-processing bacteria if you drink a little bit of milk several times a day. 1/4 cup at a time with food, they say.

I’m pretty pumped about the possibility of getting my life back, of not having to ask myself, Is this cup of dulce de leche Haagen-Dazs worth a day of nonstop flatulence? But while I’m working milk back into my diet little by little, I suggest that, um, you think twice about sniffing near my bum.