Author: laurenne

A man crossed the street in front of my car yesterday. Since I was hiding behind my windshield, I had a rare opportunity to stare at him without the possibility of awkward accidental eye contact. He had what some call a FUPA, or Fat Upper Pussy/Penis Area.  It was as if he had a monster truck tire strapped into his underwear, and he had to hobble across the street with a cane in order to carry all that extra weight. I stared without shame and followed his body from the very bottom of his ankles up. And at the top, I saw his face (Obviously. If his face weren’t there, I would have screamed). His huge bottom lip sagged down as if it were pulled by the extra weight of his FUPA. His mouth hung open, surely sloshing fellow pedestrians with uncontrollable drool.

I wanted to run out of my car and talk to this man. I wanted to know what it’s like to grow up with such a FUPA and such an uncontrollable bottom lip. Maybe one day I’ll have a bloated upper pussy area, but today I can frolic joyfully and cane-free through crosswalks and sprinklers. What’s it like not to be able to stand up at will or not drool while walking? What is it like to shop for huge underwear and not be able to go on roller coasters?

And then I thought: Holy shit. Humans are all so different. Here we are, all living these intertwining lives but experiencing such different existences. If I walked with this man around the city and stopped to buy a top hat and a croissant, we’d each come away with such unique experiences even though we bought the exact same hat.

I thought about this all day long.

And then I went to the Korean spa. It’s less of a spa and more of a haven for bodies. It’s where people go to rest their limbs and wash away their sins. Or maybe just their eczema.

The first step at the spa is: get nekked. All naked. Lots of naked.

I LOVE being naked. I prefer to sleep naked. I hate waistbands. I’ve spent entire meetings imagining how much better they would be if I were naked. One day, I will probably be a nudist. But, I wasn’t such a fan of the birthday suit until recently.  I spent plenty of my childhood hating my body and hiding it in sweatpants. I had bow-legged bird legs, but I thought I was fat. I just knew I had cellulite in places I couldn’t see. I wouldn’t say I had an eating disorder, BUT I did weigh my pasta and only eat fat-free devil’s food cakes from Healthy Choice. Remember those? 50 calories each! Maybe I had a slight eating disorder.

In junior high, I would never have imagined I’d be stripping down to prance around with my titties out in front of Korean strangers. I also would never have imagined I’d be living a life that didn’t require inch-long fake nails.

But there I was. Real nails, nude, and soaking in hot, bubbling water with other women whose tits were out– whose everything was out. I marveled at the variety of pubic hair. I marveled at the body sizes and shapes, not one like any body in any magazine. Just real beautiful bodies. Wide bodies. Skinny bodies. Dark bodies. Peachy bodies. Misshapen bodies. Bodies with random hairs in weird places. Bodies with scars. Bodies with boulder boobies. Bodies with crater titties.

A tiny older woman wearing granny panties and a bra (employees get to cover their vaginas) poked out of a hole in the wall and called my number.

My turn.

I lay naked on a padded slab while this woman put on abrasive gloves and scrubbed every inch of my body. Every inch. I’m talkin butt crack. Armpits. The strange unnamed area between my crotch and my leg. She got it. She scrubbed for a good forty minutes, occasionally dousing me with warm water to wash away the mounds of skin that had piled up on the table.

I cannot begin to describe my pride as I lay there with everything out for the world to see. I was proud that I have reached a point where I am not ashamed of my body. And I was proud of how relaxed I was. I could relax! Last year, I could get naked, but I would still have worried about whether or not the employee was judging my leg stubble or staring at the dirt in my bellybutton (I can’t get it out! Not my fault.). I have come a long way. This time, I was so relaxed that I scared myself. I thought it slightly dangerous to lie there so open, so naked, so loose. I imagined all of my organs  falling out through my vagina. Could that happen? Had anyone ever experienced this much naked relaxation before? Maybe I was the first and all my organs would plop right out onto the table. Would the woman just scrub them?

While she loofah-ed my one-day-FUPA area, I stared at all those ladies parading around in their personal glories. I realized that nudity is the great equalizer. I couldn’t tell anyone apart. That is not an Asian joke. Without clothes or phones or cars or ideas to define us, we all look the same. I couldn’t even tell if anyone had a FUPA. We all think our bodies are too fat or too thin or too weird, but when they’re all just chilling together, they’re all the damn same. We are all the same.

Perhaps we’re having slightly different experiences, but I’m pretty sure those experiences are mainly just variations of the same thing. We all want to be loved. We all spend our lives doing things we love and things we don’t love. We suffer. We laugh. We fear. We squeal with joy. We learn stuff, fail, hate ourselves, and hopefully one day learn to love ourselves no matter what. Whether we have a FUPA or a crater tit.

All the same.

[photo credit: Spencer Tunick]

I spent Valentine’s Day alone. Yeah, so? It was only because I had plans with Whitney Houston.

They suddenly fell through.

It is so strange that so many people think staying alone on Valentine’s Day is not cool. I got so many offers from friends who wanted to pull me out of my house and get me to not be depressed. Well, I wasn’t depressed. I was sipping wine in front of my space heater, writing and feeling pretty fucking great. Mostly. Maybe my womb is weeping, but I’m just dandy.

My favorite offer came a few days before V-Day from my Spanish tutor (yes, I have a Spanish tutor. I want to make sure I’m not writing the equivalent of the wrong ‘your’ in any other language.). She told me that she and her husband spent a lot of time figuring out which of their friends would be perfect for me. They analyzed them all and sweetly hand-picked one just for me. I didn’t ask for anybody. I’m TAKING A BREAK, dammit.

She interrupted my verb conjugating by showing me his picture on Facebook. Look! There he is sitting down at a party. Look! There he is sitting in a car! Look! There he is sitting in our old living room.

“That’s nice,” I said. “He’s cute.”

“Just one thing.”

“Okay.”

“He only has one leg.”

“Okay.”

“And he lives in Italy.”

Now, I’m not picky. I’m very open to new things. But, really? Am I really desperate enough to date someone who lives in Italy? I mean, REALLY? Of all the people in LA, she thinks the best person for me is someone who lives IN ITALY? Doesn’t she know how horrible it is over there (According to the cast of ‘The Jersey Shore.’)? And one leg? One leg could definitely be interesting and perhaps a new fetish I might enjoy. But she was suggesting that the BEST option for me is a peg-leg with whom I’ll have to have cybersex. Let’s make it a little harder and throw in some kids and an ex-wife.  And he should also have HIV too. And lupus. Anything AS LONG AS I’M NOT SINGLE.

She is the cutest human being I know and is obviously just looking out for me. As are all the others who offer me their nephews or their neighbors. But…

You guys. Seriously. Thanks. But, I’m cool. I am okay as a single woman! I am okay shaving my legs once a week and rarely washing my dishes. And it’s great not being left in restaurants. So, thanks but no thanks.

This has been an announcement.

LA is big. It’s all spread out, and some people refuse to go from one side to the other. It’s a maze of anonymity. I’m in a cafe right now surrounded by laptops. Clicking and more clicking. Nobody looks up. We’re all the same, but we don’t even notice each other. I did one of those asshole things today and noticed someone. I sat down at a table directly facing a woman at the table across. We keep making accidental eye contact. Sorry, lady. I broke the unwritten rule of ‘whoever sits second makes sure they’re out of the eye horizon of others.’

There are many secret LA cafe rules.

-Watch other peoples’ computers when they go to the bathroom

-Don’t take up the outlet for longer than you need.

-Don’t make loud phone calls about your Vitamin-selling business.

That last one gets broken quite often.

It’s easy for Angelenos to forget about humanity, remaining lost in their headphones.  We isolate in our cars and swim in this concrete pool of strangers and palm trees. So, when I got a call to go to Blackburg, Virginia for a job, I said YES! (with an exclamation point). It would be a week-long journey to work in an ad agency in a town with one movie theater and a few local restaurants. I accepted because I wanted to see a new town.

I also said yes because I love hotels.

Ok, and I also said yes because they promised there’d be a man standing at the airport waiting for me WITH A SIGN!

This is when I knew I had made it.
A MAN WITH A SIGN AT THE AIRPORT!!

Sure, he spelled my name wrong in two places, but STILLLLLL! I’ve made it! I’ve made it! Sure, I traveled in coach, but I still traveled on business. I made sure to tell all those in the US Airways waiting area that I was traveling on business.

“Excuse me, have they started boarding yet? I’m traveling ON BUSINESS.”

Ever since watching Working Girl in 1988, I’ve wanted a really business-y job that comes with an airport lounge membership, a briefcase, red nails, sneakers that I wear to work, and heels I change into at my desk.

Even though he spelled my name wrong, this man with the sign would have to do:

He drove my writing partner and I to our LUXURY hotel. I am capitalizing ‘luxury’ so you get an idea of how high-class this hotel was. No gym, room service, or pool, BUT my room had two TVs in it. AND a fridge. You might not understand the amount of luxury in this place until I tell you that they gave me a ‘thank you’ note at the end of my stay. MAN WITH SIGN. TWO TVs. THANK YOU NOTE. CAPITALS.

I will be signing autographs outside my apartment for the next three hours.

They gave my partner and me the keys to an annexed office where we were holed up and alone for seven days, taking breaks only to dine in the town’s local spots. There were lots of calzone restaurants. Virginians must love calzones.

It was day #2 when we ran out of ideas. We had to present our genius writings and prove we were worth all this luxury. We’d thought for two days in a row, and since we’re writers (and sensitive ‘artists’), we immediately hated all our ideas.

In an attempt to be funny, my partner wrote ‘HELP’ on the window in Post-It notes. We laughed. We scribbled some ideas on papers. We ate calzones.

By day four, we hadn’t met many locals. We tried to go to a frat party, but the Virginia Tech kids wouldn’t tell us where they were. We were too old and didn’t smell enough like Abercrombie. We had memorized every mole on each other’s faces and wanted to run away from each other. But we were TRAPPED in a vacant office. By Day Five, we really did need help.

And lucky us. Help came.

As we pulled up to our office, the cops were there. A tall one and a short one. A good and a bad one.

“We got a call about someone needing help in here?”

“Oh, we’re fine.” I told them. I froze up. Cops! I don’t know why I am always nervous around cops. They have the power to fine me and arrest me in a non-sexy way. AH! Cops. Rodney King. Cops.

“Who put this up? Who needs help?” They were pissed. They were gonna take us in and we’d surely be raped in a southern jail over Post-Its.

“Uh, sorry sir,” I said. “We, uh, we just needed help with ideas.”

“Well,” the short one said. He got closer to me. I saw a bead of sweat.

Ah! It’s all over. I’m going to be sent back to LA in a taxi without a man with a sign. I have ruined all my credibility.

“Next time,” he breathed. “Be sure to specify that. Write ‘HELP WITH IDEAS.’”

“Okay?”

“Have a good one.” They walked out.

I LOVE VIRGINIA!
In all caps.

Be more specific when faking emergencies? Sure, I can do that. Cops would never have even come in LA. Most of us are too busy to notice when someone needs help here. Unless they faint in a cafe or accidentally stop listening to their headphones, nobody notices. I just sneezed in this crowded cafe of 20 people, and nobody said a word. Why don’t I live in Virginia? They have calzones! And friendly police officers. Should I move? I think I need some ideas. HELP WITH IDEAS.

I fucking LOVE calzones.