I don’t totally understand celebrating birthdays. Aside from falling out of my mother’s vagina, I’m pretty sure I didn’t do anything too remarkable the day I was born.

So when my birthday arrives each year—songs sung, cakes cut, lines blown off hookers’ asses, donations made in my name to various charitable causes—I always feel a little silly and undeserving of the celebration. It’s not about low self-esteem. I have a sizable ego. It’s just that if anyone should be wearing a party hat, shouldn’t it be my Mom? Or her uterus?

After the standing ovation for my initial arrival, why the need for annual hubbub? [ . . . ] Continue »

When I become very tan, a lot of white people think I look Black. This is puzzling to me because when I see really tan white people, I don’t think they look Latino.

I’m back from a blissful week of tropical sun, which has apparently left me looking like a “relaxed,” “happy” cast member of UPN’s Girlfriends. Before my island getaway, I was the color of congealed oatmeal and suffering from vitamin-D deficiency induced depression. After an intensive sun-swimming-SPF 70 intervention, my complexion has deepened to a cinnamon or burnt sienna hue.

This is a Toni Morrison way of saying, I’m really tan. [ . . . ] Continue »

Every Douche up in Douche-ville liked holidays a lot. . . . But the Jana, who lived just south of Douche-ville, Did NOT!

Getting to know your apartment building neighbors is a perverse and excruciating city-specific experience that I will look back on with warmth and misplaced nostalgia when I am aged and living in seclusion in the country. So like, three years from now.

My urban neighbors are to my adult life what my best friends’ parents were to my adolescence: familiar looking strangers, about whose lives I know wildly inappropriate and intimate details. [ . . . ] Continue »

I wonder what I look like to a stranger. More specifically, I wonder what I look like from a birds-eye view, seven stories up. Apparently from this vantage point, there is something distinctive and remarkably distasteful about me. Otherwise, why would someone choose to throw a full, glass handle of vodka down at me from a rooftop?

The weekend before last I was nearly killed dead—yes, “killed dead”—when a stranger threw a full gigantic bottle of booze down at me from a rooftop. [ . . . ] Continue »

I wish I was genetically predisposed to respond to stress and extreme trauma by losing my appetite and needing to go for a run. Man, fuck those people.

Unfortunately for my pant-size, I channel the extreme emotions stemming from crisis into baking a nine-inch pumpkin cheesecake with gingersnap-pecan crust, two batches of muffins, three batches of pudding, four Thanksgiving pies, 32 scallion and goat cheese buttermilk biscuits, and a rum cake. Thank god there are always six to fifteen other people around, who are only too pleased to numb their grief and exhaustion with one of my many confections. [ . . . ] Continue »