Monday, January 30. 7 p.m. The Moth hosts a story slam. Theme: Storms. The Bitter End - 147 Bleecker between Thompson & LaGuardia.

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“I thought you Asian!”

I’m spread eagle in a windowless back room in Soho, bright white walls and fluorescent bulbs illuminating my below-the-belt nudity, thinking it’s a little cold but reasoning that if it were any warmer things might start to smell funny after a full day of this. The Asian woman is looking at my voluminous nub with nothing less than horror all over her face, tongue depressor coated with wax frozen in mid-air. I am filled with shame. I didn’t have time to give it my usual pre-wax trim with the clippers, and now this.

Her eyes meet mine and we are locked in a moment of shared humanity. Her face softens. She’s really seeing me now, she’s seeing my eyes a little more clearly. She smiles in a possibly condescending, “Oh you poor girl” kind of way. “Oh, I see.” Her teeth are hanging out now, and she turns back to my crotch, the tongue depressor moves in for the kill.

“You’re white.”

I think that’s the word. In all honesty, I don’t remember.

Yo! I’m goin’ to Mexico City to visit my girl Bomee. I would hyperlink to her profile but I’m already late to work. I fly out on 2/16 and fly back on 2/20. We’re gonna be two tall Asian women roamin’ the streets.

Has anyone been? Am I going to get kidnapped? What’s cool to do in Mexico City? And where can I get a book that will teach me how to speak Spanish in two weeks?

Uno, dos, tres … agua … with thanks to Sesame Street.

Do this on Tuesday the 17th.

Matty Charles is playing at the Red Lion, 151 Bleecker, on Tuesday Jan. 17th at 7:30 p.m. He is truly wonderful and gifted and amazing and I encourage all of y’all to check it out. Everyone I’ve introduced him to has peeped his crazy talent off the bat. Even the guy that got my Dirty Secret Santa gift dropped me a thank you:

I know that you are OOTO and will probably not get to this email until February or so, but… 

I wanted to let you know how much I like the CD that I got at Secret Santa. I think I listened to it 5 times this weekend. A totally solid CD although I think that the first and last songs are my favorite.

Anyway, just wanted to say thanks.

Some musings on the 100 meter dash.

Dana Pellosma. I’m driving out of my parking garage on a Friday evening and the song is playing.

Kris Kross will make you
Jump! Jump!
uh huh, uh huh

She was singing it, under her breath, at the starting line for the 100 meter dash at the track for my high school. We were sophomores. She was a little white girl from a little farm school in the Northern State Conference; I was a lanky half Asian girl from a little farm school five miles away. She was jumping, warming herself up, getting ready for the race. Her blocks were set, my blocks were set, and I knew she was gonna kick my ass.

Groundskeeper Willy looks like the kinda guy who has sinewy muscles. Lean, long, tight, taught; even though he’s just a cartoon you pretty much know that his rippling forearms are pure muscular efficiency. Ropes. Dana had Groundskeeper Willy legs. They weren’t all that long because she wasn’t all that tall, but you could just tell they were pure power.

I knew for a fact they were pure power. I learned the hard way my freshman year. I built a database with the help of my old man to track the times of all the girls in my area. If anyone’s 100, 200, 400, 4×1 or 4×4 times were listed in the South Bend Tribune, you could be sure that I’d be dialing up on the modem and punching in their numbers right after dinner. Dad would print out the updated results every day at the office and proudly hand me the times sorted every which way but loose. Sorted by school. Event. Time. Filtered for this, that, and the other. I could predict with pretty solid accuracy how every race I ran would turn up.

Dana screwed me up. She was new in town, which was rare in those parts, and she hadn’t made it into the database yet. I was supposed to come in second to a senior at LaVille, not a freshman. She smoked me in the two, not my favorite race to begin with, but still. I wasn’t dogmeat. Freshman year she went on to get second or third in the entire state. Remember, this is Indiana – we didn’t do the whole class thing so farm girls were running against the big black girls from cities like Gary or Indianapolis or South Bend. For that skinny white girl to do so well. Well, you knew she was something special.

There was a big article written about her in the South Bend Tribune. I pored over every word, saved it in my scrapbook. Apparently she had an obstacle course in her backyard that she used to train with, for fun. I imagined something really slick like a high quality red rubber track, but I’m sure the reality was much more mundane.

The bad thing about Dana was that she was in my conference, so as long as crazy legs Pellosma was around, I was going to win Northern State Conference or Sectionals or any of it. Crap. At least not in the one. I’d have to focus on that heinous beast of a race, the four – or, as older guys would call it, guys whose glory days of track were long gone, “the 440”.

My cousin Vic had never spoken a word to me my entire life and hasn’t spoken one since. He had a non-ironic mustache and my family was hosting the once-in-a-blue-moon family reunion. We all figured he was an alcoholic and there was an outside chance he took after his old man and beat his wife, too. “So, Nita, I hear you’re a pretty good runner, eh?”

“I’m doing okay, yeah.”

“Yeah, I used to do the hurdles. The hurdles. High hurdles. High hurdles down at Ball State. I ran for Ball State, coupla years.”

“Cool.”

What’s a kid supposed to say to this stranger who shares a few strands of DNA? Hey, cousin Vic, maybe you and I got the same random bone length ratio action from Grampa Roscoe! Maybe we both got fast twitch muscles from him, too! Think that’s enough to have you and your siblings and your parents to stop talking about my family behind our back? Think that’s enough to have everyone descended from Roscoe minus you and yours stop talking about _you_ behind _your_ back?

Sophomore year, it’s cold but not bitter, we’re wearing shorts but not tanks. I’ve got on my bike shorts underneath those flitty things. God, I remember freshman year in college and getting that little turdlet of an underoo. This was my uniform? This butt-cap? This bright blue bloomer? You’ve gotta be kidding. This was before I knew all about hot wax and the art of haircare maintenance so the thought of stuffing the nub into that blue spandex panty, and stretching out at the blocks. Christ almighty. I wasn’t thinking about how big my butt was, althought that’s what some of the guys on the team were transfixed by, apparently. All I could think about was the fro.

Anyway. Sophomore year, I’m in the red and black, Dana’s in the blue and white. She’s in lane four, I’m in five, I know she’s gonna kick my ass.

The Daddy Mac will make you
Jump! Jump!

“Where are you from? I don’t remember you in middle school. I definitely would have remembered you in middle school!”

“Yeah, I moved here, I’m from Arizona originally. They used to tell me there they never saw a white girl run so fast as me! But hey, good luck!”

“Thanks, I’ll try and give you a good race.” I’d do my best. I knew damn well how boring it was to always be number one. I sure wasn’t Stacy Davis of South Bend Adams, whose times in my database were neck and neck with Dana’s, and who won the 100 our freshman year. But I’d try to make Dana work a bit for her blue.

“You actually do, you’re a lot closer than anyone else around here.”

She meant it as a compliment, and I took it as such. But let’s be honest, several weeks from that race Dana would clock a sub-12 100 as a 15 or 16 year old kid to win the state title. That was big. My best race ever would also that come that year, but it would only be 12.77, and I probably had wind on my back. But Dana. She was the real deal. What I’d give to have that speed, that talent, that fair skin, those blue eyes. My hands are on the line and I’m stretching back my legs to get into the blocks, and I know I will not win but I feel a little bit honored to be a lot closer to her than anyone else around here.

Dana won that race, and Northern State Conference, and Sectionals, and Regionals, and State. She still holds the school record at LaVille.

I googled her recently. Seems she ended up at a Community College for a few years in North Carolina, near the Tennessee border. Don’t know if she ran track still, she didn’t run her senior year in high school for whatever reason. But the picture on their website had a girl with a big bright smile and the sparkle of something special. I wonder what happened to that girl, that Dana Pellosma.

I wonder if Dana ever wonders about that skinny girl from Glenn at all.

I know that I do.

1. I’d post a bulletin, but now it’s so far below the fold that I ask of self, “What’s the point?”

2. I’ll be in LA this weekend and Vegas next week for a “work” “convention”. Around? Call me. Don’t have my number? Call Millsy.

3. Please tell the security guard for my office building that just because I gave him an excess box of treats from one of many vendor gifts this holiday season, that it didn’t mean I wanted him to ask for my number on my way out of the office this evening. It just meant that I had too much food from vendors, and I am a nice Midwestern girl, and I wanted him to offer to watch a big ole’ box of mine so I wouldn’t have to carry it two long blocks to my parking garage (mission accomplished). I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to give you, the security guard with a limited grasp of English at best, the impression that I, the Very Important Executive With An Impressive Diction And Vocabulary, wanted you to ask for my phone number. Although a man in a uniform is a vision to behold …

4. I hate all variants of the phrase “navel gazing”. Shut up. Who coined that? They must die. All this “navel gazing” crap with the new year makes me want to eat a lot of Kobe beef balls at Megu paid for by The Washington Post, down it with expensive sake, and lock myself into the single stall bathroom that they have and vomit the first seven courses straight down into the yaw of the porcelain god to make room for courses eight and nine. Anyway, who, looking down introspectively, is actually gazing at their navel? I see only my two very large, very wide feet whose toenails, by the way, are badly in need of a trim. Or if not that, then the messy ‘fro of my southern hairdo a.k.a. Nubby ( (c) ALO, 1994) which is badly in need of a trim, especially if I plan on wearing the red bikini at any pool or hot tub in Vegas. (Note to self: you need to pack.) But I sure as hell ain’t gazin’ at my navel. Bunion gazing. Booby gazing. Pooby gazing. Fine. Navel gazing? Eat me.

Ok that’s all. I’m tired and my “I had Lasik” eyeballs are dry and, shit, I got work tomorrow.

xoxoxoANP!

P.S. Dear Friendster Server Boxes: YOU SUCK