(Originally published on Nerve.com, 2007) The gift box was small and square, and my face flushed as my boyfriend handed it to me. How perfect, that he would get me a ring for my twenty-seventh birthday; how excited he looked, handing it to me first thing that morning, as I propped myself up on my elbow in bed. He wasn’t down on one knee, I noticed, but that was all right. I still planned to say yes. I unwrapped the present eagerly, the sharp corners of the plastic packaging indenting my fingertips, my heart shriveling under my ribs. It wasn’t a ring. It was something that looked like a small, white plastic egg. Welcome to your tamagotchi!, the packaging said. Your new virtual pet! “Isn’t it cool?” asked Tim, grinning. “Here, lemme see it.” He reached out and swiped the toy from me, turning it over in his hands, studying the directions written in both English and Japanese. “Isn’t it cool?” he asked again. “Don’t you love it?” He handed it back to me, triumphant. “Here, turn it on. I want...

(Originally published in NYPress, 1994) The night we finally kissed, we kissed a lot. At first, she didn’t want to open her mouth to my tongue. By 4:30 am, she was coming against my thigh. At least I thought it was 4:30. I thought, If it’s 4:30, and I get in a cab right now, I can get home in ten minutes, and I can tell him we went out to eat. I had this idea where if I kissed her, if she would just kiss me, it would be okay. I would have everything I needed, and it still wouldn’t be cheating, it would be okay. An honest kiss, out of love and respect, and only once, to make the wanting go away — better, I knew, than letting it haunt me. I didn’t want to be unfaithful. After four years of hard virtue, I wore my monogamy like a medal. Yet lately I was brimming with furtive dreams, woke up fevered and damp, and I knew I had to thwart myself somehow, kiss temptation away. Just a kiss and I’d be okay. I thought, One kiss, and I’ll happily go back to...

(Originally published in NYPress, 1994) 1. Make fewer lists, or stick to the lists I make. Stop making lists of lists. Stop putting “change life” on lists of things to do. 2. Stop thinking about Eliza. Just forget all about her. Understand and internalize the idea that it is counter-productive to think about her. Stop calling and hanging up on her machine. 3. Get out more. Go see museums. Enrich myself. Stop kidding myself that walking around Soho with Sophie on a Saturday is enriching. Shoes are not art. Sophie disagrees. “Get new shoes,” she says. “Change your life.” She drives me crazy lately, with all her fabulous fatuous answers: get new shoes, fuck somebody else, just get over it. Sophie thinks of all her little philosophies as very fittingly succinct, like Zen. She reads too many magazines. “You are a classic woman who loves too much,” she tells me. We’re at Whole Foods, cruising vegetarians. Mahatma Sophie. “You’re a...

(Originally published in BUST Magazine, 1995) I knew the minute it started. We were at that bar, The No-Tell Motel, and he did his trick with the coin.  He can flip a coin through his fingers, over the tops of his knuckles, smooth.  I suppose I once found this novel. They were sitting just too close on the sofa, trading hot shoulder, and I was smoldering deeper into my vinyl stool, getting sticky and drunk.  It was a Friday night.  Fuck Night.  2:30 AM.  I saw him slide the quarter slyly from his pocket. “Plato was a fascist,” he told her, shooting his cuffs.  “He thought he could dictate reality.” I watched the coin flash and turn, admired his technique.  She looked lamb-like up at him, nodded yes.  And so, she was his for the having.   “Katz wants to have sex with you,” I told her.  We’re candid like that. “What, are you kidding?”  Her tinny, cordless voice pitched up a little at the high end.  So she already knew.  “No...