Girl on the Brink: Surviving Desperate Times with Desperate Measures

Day 205 — Happy Halloween

Boo! The most frightening thing about health-care reform is that you might not be covered. Sorry, not going into a diatribe about things political. Go find another blogger for that, though I do have a pictorial about health-care reform that I’m debating about posting. I think saying important stuff with pictures is much more revealing than dropping my [...]

Day 204 — Scary Jobs

Let’s get the mortician, embalmer and grave digger out of the way and get to a really scary job—department store Santa. Hot merry velvet red suit, scratchy fake beard and evacuation-long lines of children who are herded by their stressed-out parents to sit on Santa’s lap in a massive throne chair. Think of it from a child’s [...]

Day 203 — Comforting You

ANN’S NOTE: Andrew Beaujon, managing editor of Washington City Paper, spoke with me yesterday and updated his blog entry, Washington Post Profile Brings Up Touchy Subject: What Claim Do Writers Have on Their Bylines? Everything south seems to provide comfort—south of the waist, south of the border and southern food. We all need a little comfort now [...]

Day 202 — Stigmas in Labor, in Love

ANN’S NOTE: Ann makes a splash in the Washington City Paper—Washington Post Profile Brings Up Touchy Subject: What Claim Do Writers Have on Their Bylines? Every time I a write about Viagra men tell me they don’t need it, and they use subtle words that beat around the bush, as if I should be impressed. I’m flummoxed [...]

Day 201 — What I Don’t Need to Know

My urge; have to pee. My luck; enter bathroom at The Diner in Adams Morgan. Two stalls. Both occupied; one with a female caregiver (me thinking young grandma) talking to her three-ish something girl. “When did you throw up?” says the caregiver. No answer. I cross my legs. No action in the other stall—feet hanging off the toilet [...]

Day 200 — Your Life In 3 Minutes

When I go out with a guy for the first time, some charge ahead with a 3-minute dossier of themselves as if they were interviewing for a job. The conversation goes something like this, “I’ve been divorced twice, have three kids, two grandchildren and used to be active in sports before I injured myself in a [...]

Day 199 — Dream Jobs, Part II

ANN’S NOTE: Saturday—a day to re-post one of my favorite entries and escape. Where would you take Ann? Some jobs are to fantasize for. They’d bring me instant fame, lottery-like income, enough to fly to San Juan, Costa Rica, and drive to Quepos to see if the hot proprietor of a hotel I stayed at while [...]

Day 198 — Analyze This

Ann’s rushing and running late—again. This time to the doctor’s office. No car. No time for a cab, or nerve to hitchhike. She hauls up her bike from the basement, dashes out the front door and swings her leg over the bike seat to catch the pedal. But, uh-oh, her fanny flies into the air like a dog [...]

Day 197 — Can You Also Do This?

We work because we have to. We make love because we want to, and we procreate because we feel the need to. Simply defined, we multitask. Why can’t we reset the dial and return to times before the word multitask entered the lexicon of our language? Own a dog or cat? You don’t see Mittens hunched over in [...]

Day 196 — Ass for Cash

If any of you have bothered to look below my ass on the Girl On the Brink logo, you’d see that the tagline reads, “Surviving Desperate Times with Desperate Measures.” Increasingly, I read about a lot of desperate people doing desperate things, such as selling all their stuff and moving from places like Detroit to greener [...]