wuv woo drew

"Eathy, breethy, beauthiful..."

How A Series of Horrible Essays Taught Me All I Need To Know About Modern Love And Made Me Crawl Into A Bucket of Fried Chicken Left On The Roadside

I have this fantasy where I get the Sunday Times. After sleeping in until 10 or so, I begin the last weekend day in my sun-filled living room curled up on the couch by the huge bay windows, cuddling close to my fiance who has just given me the greatest orgasm of my life. He used to be a sociopathic rapist with a trust fund and I, a staunch feminist who preferred to date non-rapists. But you know what? We learned to compromise. That is what love is all about. And now, cuddling close on the couch together, the clock shows it's nearly 11, and we're so intelligent we've almost completed the entire crossword. "12 letter name, philosopher, wrote On Women..." he reads aloud. We sit thinking, curling our fingers together.

"Schopenhauer!" I scream. He looks at me admiringly. "How did you ever get to be so beautiful but so brilliant too?" he gushes, "I didn't know they made women like you! I would never have been raping all those years if I knew someone like you was out there." My lower class roommate Marmsies walks in on our cuddling, and exclaims in her slightly Cuban accent, "My Momma always says when you got somethin' good, you gots to hold onto it!" My fiance turns to me, looking soulfully into my eyes, "That Cuban girl is right....Marry me now."

Does this sound like something you have or may want someday?

Then you probably love Modern Love, and maybe you should be a Modern Love writer!

I'd like to outline the fairly simple formula of a Modern Love column to make it easier for you to find this elusive brand of love and then write about it for a prestigious paper! First, it's very important to be an educated, upper middle class female. Actually don't bother trying to find modern love if you're not. You can leave subtle hints of your elitist qualifications by describing how you picked up your New Yorker copies scattered throughout his apartment after he broke your heart, or you can casually mention "pre-nups", "Ph.D's", "foie gras", "Park Slope", or "Schopenhauer" at any point during the course of your essay. All of these methods have worked beautifully in the past.

Sometimes a great twist on this element is how your educated position set you up to fail at love. For example in my FAVORITE column ever, "Changing My Feminist Mind, One Man at a Time" the author demonstrates how her superb intelligence and thorough understanding of feminism actually inhibited true love. Someone get this girl a book deal! She is a 19th wave feminist!

I read, re-read, and underlined "Backlash," "The Beauty Myth" and "The Feminine Mystique." I grew enraged by what I learned. Enraged, and utterly confused. Who was keeping women down? Men. But who were just so cute that I couldn't sleep at night for thinking and writing and obsessing about them? You guessed it, the self-same.

Then I went off to an all-women's college, Smith, where I didn't see a whole lot of men. I joined the campus women's group and studied up on gender issues. My rage toward men in general grew ever stronger, as did my desire to meet that one specific man who could make my dreams come true.

It also helps, once you've established your superb white upper class affiliations to dabble with some lower classes. You see they're not as smart as you, thus they are not constricted by their own intelligence. They can teach you how to love purely and intensely, to rid yourself of the shackles of the Ivy League pedigree. Find a poor musician, like this week's columnist did, one who will kind of embarrass you, but who will play Damaged by Primal Scream, and tell you “This song makes me love you so much I want to die." So romantsies! Also, if you can manage to date a rapist serving time in prison you get like, a billion trillion bonus points. That is way modern love.

Lower class people are also very important in the Modern Love story arc to help bring you to your senses. When you're sobbing on some bus, after collecting your smart person materials from your ex-boyfriend's house, make sure that some guy with a "West Indian accent" lightly jokes with you, "Aw, that fool must be crazy to give up a nice young thang like yourself!" Let these people be the voice of sensibility. Let them guide you to your ultimate catharsis. You can even dedicate your entire essay to these characters like in "How My Plumber Turned Water Into Wine" (but remember the focus should still be on you and the shackles of your upper class life). I mean, this week's author comes to her senses thanks to a tenant in a flophouse!

So there I was, a girl with a university education, a glowing résumé, a loving family, and all the other annoying characteristics of a charmed life, writhing on the urine-stained floor of a flophouse. And I was making such a scene that the tenant from the next room, a hulking man in torn boxers, emerged from his den, pointed a shaming finger at me and shouted, “Girl, you need to get your mind right."

Once a poor tenant in a urine-soaked flophouse admonishes you for being crazy you can finally say, "If this dirty dude thinks I'm being crazy, then I must be being too crazy!" and begin the process of love's recovery. Brush the urine right off you. Go to the 'Bucks, grab yourself your usual Grande Skim Latte. Sit and listen to Norah Jones while sipping your steamy drink and process what just happened, though don't come to any conclusions that could, you know, subvert the patriarchy. This experience you've just had-- this is modern love-- and you should write about it so that I can barf up my Sunday brunch and not put on any winter weight.

The Holiday Gift Guide!

The Bullshit Horn. We have a version of this in our home. It lightens the mood during times of tension. It gets Monsies all cute and annoyed which is a gift in and of itself. Sometimes when I'm alone I set it beside me on the couch to watch The Hills and it provides important commentary in the perfect pitch and tone that I myself am incapable of achieving. Really, the bullshit horn is like giving a friend to a friend.



The Snotty Egg Separator. As a Jewess I appreciate the subtle anti-semitism here. This man though dubbed a WASPy "Peter Petrie" looks exactly like my grandpa. And who likes eggs? Jewish people. More importantly, who separates eggs? Jewish people. I say take back the nose and use this whilst baking your fav holiday kugel.



Speaking of noses, the I AM ME album of 18th wave feminist Ashlee Simpson provides a great gift to those who adhere to the two major values of 18th wave feminism: nose jobs make a woman and "my boyfriend he don't answer on the telephone/ I don't even know where the hell he goes/ but all my girls are here in a circle and nobody is going to break through/ L.O.V.E./ Girls are for life!"



What do you get when you combine the sister of an 18th wave feminist with a 4th wave feminist like Dane Cook and an Angus Third Pounder? Employee of the Month and an Angus Third Pounder to eat while watching it. Package them together for the ultimate present. This movie tackles issues of class too!




Lastly, everyone loves when you get personal with bad grammar or inside jokes. My favorite holiday presents are the customizable magnets and mugs at Zazzle. Book Club is getting an LOLcatz-themed book present. These mugs were intended for my roommates but I'm running into copyright problems. Apparently Cisco Adler doesn't want his balls on your drinking apparatus. But I will think of something. Even if I have to do and extreme ball close-up shot.

Billy Blanks: Thighs of Modernism

"Melanctha, I certainly do think I could make you feel it right to tell me. I certainly do think all I did wrong was to let Jane Harden tell me. I certainly do know I never did wrong to learn what she told me. I certainly know very well, Melanctha, if I had come here to you, you would have told it all to me, Melanctha."-Gertrude Stein, Three Lives, pg 115.

"When the identical fact recurs, we must think of it in a fresh manner, see it under a somewhat different angle, apprehend it in different relations from those in which it last appeared."--William James, The Stream of Thought.

"In both cases, modern art serves to remind its audience that what the eye or ear beholds as a natural and given reality is itself the product of much active construction on the part of the beholder."-Jonathan Levin, Introduction to Three Lives.

I've been doing my old Tae-Bo video workouts every day since I've come home. I still have the entire tape memorized, even Billy's instructional dialogue. Though what I hadn't realized during my after-school workouts in high school is that Billy Blanks is a brilliant deconstructivist:

During squat kicks: "Every one talking about how they want to work their butt, it's not firm enough or tight enough. You know that black bikini. If you do what I tell you right now you'll get into that black bikini. Push yourself! Think about that bikini. Think about that bikini! Think about you in that bikini! This isn't about a swimsuit! This isn't about a bikini. Reach inside and PUSH yourself. Do you want to fit in that swimsuit?"

During jab-cross sequence: "Michael back there is talking about how he's locked up. He's a top basketball player, but you know what he's doing today? Pushing himself. Reach up. Reach up and grab onto your higher power. Whatever it is-- God, that glass of water Reach up and ask your higher power to help. Ask your higher power to give you something. C'mon Michael. C'mon get through this set. No one can help you. No one can help you. You got to find it in yourself. This is about you. You got to reach inside and help yourself.

I swear these are verbatim.

Ode to Bunsies

This is bunny circa 2004. My bestie Dawn and I were high and set up a Bunny photo shoot. He gives good photo.




This is bunny and me circa 2002. I look retarded, but Bunny looks really hawt. Sometimes for internet pictures you have to take one for the team.


Some facts about Bunny:


My uncle gave him to me at Thanksgiving dinner when I was 2. I started crying immediately. Perhaps it was a symbolic reenactment of the Native Americans proffering dead rabbits to the Pilgrims, and the Pilgrims shooting them.

His name is simply Bunny. Shut up. Fuck you.

He is a boy. His fav food is Skittles. And though he's technically older I just say he's 4 in bunny years, thus he is eternally young.

For an entire year all Bunny said to anyone was "Ou est la baguette avec la beret?" after I watched some PBS kids show featuring a baguette wearing a beret who repeated that line incessantly.

I once made my little sister shoplift me a Snickers by threatening her with "Bunny won't be your friend if you don't!"

Bunny was on the cover of a Paul Golding book about homosexual relationships and existential malaise. This freaked me out to no end, because I had never seen another bunny like mine before and thought he was singular. And because then of course I read the book.



When I got scarlet fever in 5th grade bunny came to the hospital with me. My parents gingerly told me that we might have to give bunny back to his bunny family and I was like, "Don't patronize me. If you touch him I will hate you guys forever." He took a Lysol bath instead.

When boys stay over I hide bunny under the pillow. Once my gentleman friend is snoring I pull bunny out and spoon him as ush.

Bunny is not anorexic. He is just so thin because he wakes up either pressed between my thighs or smashed under my stomach.

In a writing class I took in college I wrote a story about a grown man who still slept with his female teddy bear, and the people in my workshop were like, "It's great how you use the stuffed animal as a foil to showcase his fear of human intimacy" and I was like, you're all such pretentious idiots, this is just a charming story about a man who loves his teddy, fuck you.

After 13 months with my last boyfriend I started making him have post-coital conversations with bunny about the sad trajectory of Chris Hitchen's career. Bunny would whisper his replies in my ear and I would be like, "Well Bunny disagrees with you about The Trial of Henry Kissinger." I think I was testing the boundaries of obnoxiousness here, but he thought it was adorable. He started to say "I love you" to Bunny. I knew then that I had to break up with him, because if I could make him have conversations with my stuffed animal then he loved me way more than I deserved and I was already abusing that power.

Every Thanksgiving my Grandma tries to throw Bunny away. I think the thought of me still sleeping with him keeps her up at night. She somehow believes Bunny is preventing me from having a husband. I fear her attempts will be more determined this year since my sister is getting married on Friday.

When I go home for Thanksgiving I put Bunny on the top shelf in my closet where both my dog and my 5'4 grandma can't reach him.

This is Bunny last May spooning with Dawn's dog Nikko. They immediately recognized a gentleness in each other.

Margot at the Wedding.

I wish I could just write a haiku about this. Or, like, not write about it at all, but I made this promise two months ago that I would write every day to try to take some of the paralyzing fear out of writing, or at least, you know, normalize the paralyzing fear into a daily ritual like my 10am Greek yogs with Splenda. And I don't really have anything else going on around here. Topical, almost, because in Margot at The Wedding Nicole Kidman plays an East Coast writer whose paralyzing fears turn her into a crazy betch who writes all her short stories about everyone else's dramas.

We have so much in common except she's prettier.


I saw the preview to Margot before Darjeeling, and was like "Great, another movie about white people problems" but as part of my religion I see everything with Jack Black in it (including The Holiday). What can I say? The Charming- Chubster -Finding -Love genre is my favorite film category. Right up there with New Wave.

i wuv woo Jack. let's abbrevs and baby talk togeths in bed, k?



Unfortunately, the movie isn't really about Jack. It's more about sisters. I almost always hate movies about sisters because they're so untrue. I love my sissies just as much as these damn characters do and we fight and shit, but no one ever throws a fucking plate across the room and erupts into hysterics when one of us disapproves of the other's boyfriend. I mean once when I was little my older sister threw a pool ball at my face and gave me a black eye, but she's since paid me $300 not to mention that story at family functions. When I strike it rich myself, I'll pay my little sister $150 to stop bringing up how I pretended not to know her at the bus stop when the mean older boys were making fun of her headgear (she had some bad teeth). Anyhow, that's about as dramatic as sister relationships get. We solve our problems with money like everyone else.

Nicole Kidman plays Margot, a successful fiction writer who hates all the men in her life, both her overly kind husband and her overly assholish lover, and takes it out on her precocious preteen son, Claude.

She's the type of mother who tells her son inappropriate things, like how she's stoned, how her sister is pregnant, and how her sister's betrothed is a big fat loser. When she gets disturbed by rifts in her romantic life she calls Claude ugly, or lazy, or stupid. She was so mean to her son it made me uncomfortable. Did I also mention I hate movies that are centered around bad moms? It's like, oh if she's a successful fiction writer, she's got to be a crazy horrible betch mother too.

To be fair, Joan really was a terrible betch, but her gracious living guide changed my entire party life.


This was one of those character-driven domestic dramas like The Squid and The Whale, or The Anniversary Party, or We Don't Live Here Anymore, all of which are excellently depressing because even though the characters may be doing bad things, you care about them. I didn't care about anyone in Margot. My vagina got kind of wet when Jack Black started crying, but that was about it, as far as emoting goes.

My favorite part of the evening is when Liz, Laurs, and I were picking up snacks at a nearby deli and after we were rung up I blurted out, "Oh I'll just stash these in my pursy!"

"Pursy", is not what the cashier thought I said. One day abbrevs are gonna get me shot!

I haven't been this excited since the Ryan Reynolds/Jessica Alba remake of Epic Of Gilgamesh (translated from old English to "Good Luck Chuck").

I was born to see Beowulf this weekend.