The Other Side.

Have you ever been able to reveal the weakest, most morally questionable aspects of yourself to someone, and never have it come back to bite you in the ass?

I didn't think so.

There's a window in a relationship when you can intimate that these flaws exist within your soul. This window usually lasts, oh, a few hours in the aggregate. It's a delightful time: The time when you feel you have found true empathy in another human being, the time when you feel loved no matter what; the time when you can open up and accept that your dearest beloved is not perfect, because you love him or her so, and if they had a reason to be imperfect, surely it was a very good one. Usually this reason involves parents.

Speaking of parents, this is also that moment of unconditional love: The feeling you spend a lifetime hoping to recapture, if you're lucky enough to capture it even once. From a parent.

This is why many of us find Lost in Translation so enchanting: it represents that stage of intimacy where all (or many) flaws are revealed and all flaws are Deep and Charming, and yet Not a Relentless Feature of One's Daily Reality. It is the ultimate union of flawed individuals, but it never really happens in reality, which emphasizes my point.

Most of us fear being rejected if we reveal our true selves, but not with our significant other, because we have already been through that fire and it is Okay. But then, disconcertingly, it is suddenly Not Okay. The foible that was considered cute for the purposes of dating is now considered questionable for the purposes of a real relationship. The vulnerability that was once the seat of true love becomes a wearisome liability in the business of caring, day in and day out.

Be very careful when you start in on such a foible with your loved one: It usually involves some aspect of yourself.

I think about this all the time: What could I really say, or should I really say, regarding the lesser aspects of my self, history, present and future? If I do, when or how will I be punished? Will it be like last time? And am I capable of being a trustee of everything I know about a person I love, without ever using it to punish?

And then I think, man: I could really use a karaoke session right now.

Music: "More Than This"

PS. The bf and I dressed up per above for Halloween. It went well. We are not like Bob and Charlotte. But we do have a karaoke history, and despite the post above, he's a pretty understanding guy.

When Autumn Leaves...

Fall used to be my favorite season.

I loved the change in the air, the colors, and most of all the smells: smoke, cinnamon, warming dough, pumpkin, cider, dried vegetation. The crisp wind also signaled new prospects. The school year always brought another chance to be better, to stand out in some previously unimaginable way, even though the reality was that every move I made at school was oriented toward not standing out.

Several things have slowly chipped away at my welcoming attitude toward fall as an adult. During a particularly bad season, I learned from Kay Redfield Jamison's Night Falls Fast (you know, just some LIGHT READING) that the likelihood of suicide peaks in the fall.

I never forgot that tidbit as I walked through the ensuing banks of dying leaves and cheerless Halloween displays, hardening myself against the deepening chill and becoming fearful of how the darkness encroaching on daytime would eventually obscure whatever brightness survived inside me.

The last fall that I remember enjoying involved a corn maze and small towns and colorful drives. After that came a series of autumnless years in San Francisco, then a fall spent preparing for and recuperating from a surgery, then a fall spent driving to and from a job I utterly loathed. I did find love during an October, but it was disconnected from the colors and smells of the season.

By the time this past August rolled around, I was trying to ignore the rising sense of dread at summer ending. Hurricane Irene buzzsawed through my attempt to bid summer a proper farewell by the sea. The first day after Labor Day dawned cold and cloudy.

Now it's October, and I walk through the streets looking at my phone half the time, maybe turning my face to the sun a couple of times before going to soak up the rays in front of some glowing rectangle at the office or at home.

Ironically, I started thinking about maybe going on some kind of tech fast directly after reading a few obituaries about Steve Jobs (on my iPhone, natch). Taking a break from the screen on the train, I switched to magazines and read "Personal Best," an article in The New Yorker about coaching written by the surgeon Atul Gawande.

"Surgery is, at least, a relatively late-peaking career," Gawande writes. "It's not like mathematics or baseball or pop music, where your best work is often behind you by the time you're thirty. Jobs that involve the complexities of people or nature seem to take the longest to master: the average age at which the S&P 500 chief executive officers are hired is fifty-two, and the age of maximum productivity for geologists, one study estimated, is around fifty-four."

I felt a surge of hope reading Gawande's career analysis, thinking of all the late-blooming authors in the world and the idea that there was still time to become one of them. After all, writing (and, contrary to Gawande's analysis, pop music) does involve the complexities of people and nature. But then I thought of all the early-peaking authors and wondered if writing belonged with pop music in some ineffable space where you get a glimpse of human feeling and a brief chance to capture it, and then you're washed up.

Either way, what have I been doing to master writing -- or anything? To be honest, precious little. I've been screwing around and trying to avoid failure. Here I was reading about two people -- Jobs and Gawande -- who have arrived at significant contributions to society by being willing to fail and by engaging with the world (the one not on the screen). I have derived major personal benefits from these contributions to technology and medicine.

Of course, on the technological front, there are downsides. Here are a few things I do less since the iWeb became a daily fixture in my life:

- handwriting
- any writing
- listening to albums
- daydreaming
- watching people
- reading books
- doing crosswords
- socializing
- calling my mom
- looking long and hard at anything
- staring out the window

Technology is not to blame for this -- it's just an accessory. It does reduce the ability to pay attention to the real world, to the things that matter. The tool that makes life easier becomes a substitute for your actual life. The network that connects you to people also erodes the need for their presence. Distractions become distractions from distractions.

And now it's fall. The swirling leaves are as incontrovertible as the gathering lines around my eyes. It's a do-or-die kind of season. And it's not too late to master something, even if it is only turning my face to the sun. It's not too late to love fall again.

Music: "Autumn Leaves"

Radio Silence.

"I dunno if you were following the hearings about Google yesterday," someone typed to me today. I was not.

I also did not watch the Emmys. Or the MTV Awards. I reasoned out of reading the entirety of last week's New Yorker except for the T.S. Eliot essay by telling myself, "All of these pieces will end up in some book at some point. You can read them then, if you're really interested." I only half-watched The Jobs Speech.

I haven't vacuumed. I haven't finished any good non-Twilight books that I can remember. "Seen any good ...?" No.

And, oh yeah, I obviously haven't been blogging either.

Which led me to ask myself today: What the hell have I been doing?

I've been exploding my brain on seemingly simple work-related blog posts such as this one.

I've been attending energy conferences in Aspen and fleeing Hurricane Irene instead of enjoying a long weekend at the Delmarva beaches.



I've been doing more listening and less talking, not necessarily because I want to, but because it seems like that's what's called for lately.

I've been worrying.

I've been getting some deals.

What the hell have I been doing?

I've been trying to Eat Right, which means spending amazing amounts of time chopping things for labor-intensive (but delicious) recipes like this one.

I've been deciding, some nights when I have a thought about posting here, that maybe I'm better off not sitting at the computer and plugging into my neuroses.

Then I've been going to bed and having epic, bizarre dreams fueled by said neuroses, nocturnal UncMos that involve rats, labyrinthine airports, and forgetting to check my phone with disastrous results.

I've been watching/reading things that I enjoy but that are completely irrelevant to the current culture: Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List and a collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami published in 2006.

I've been running about four to five years behind on most things.

In my time off from Eating Right, I have been Eating Wrong. This includes receiving instruction on making (and in the process consuming several) macarons.


I've been wondering what radio silence actually means, anyway, and looking it up.

I've been perfecting my losing streak in Scrabble.

I've been staring at my iPhone.

I've been taking in more and more info, but feeling like I know less and less.

I've been continuing to wade through the neverending sea of stuff that I have stored at my parents', finding chestnuts such as this in the process:


I've been realizing that I will probably never connect with my coworkers now the way I did in my 20s and part of my 30s and wondering whether this is just my own experience, or one of those many things about getting old that you have to figure out for yourself because no one tells you.

I've been blasting the knot in my shoulder with various healing techniques that, thus far, have not worked.

I've been meaning to answer that email.

I've been listening to this, this and this and I don't know what else. I've been wishing I could fall in love with an album like I used to, while acknowledging that I haven't really tried to.

I've been wondering what you've been up to and how it's become so long since we've been in touch.

What have you doing (or not)?

Grandfathered In.

Saw an old friend from an old job today after, I don't know, 10-odd years of living our lives and trading the occasional email. In the old days, we'd sit in the crappy Irish pub after work sometimes, drinking whiskey sours and talking about fiction-writing.

Today, we sat in a middling hotel restaurant at lunchtime talking about real life -- kids, jobs, real estate, book promotion (not that I have any kids or real estate or a book to promote) -- and yet, in a weird way, it was like no time had passed and we were still in the crappy Irish pub.

We talked about all the people we'd known and befriended from our old workplace. "The thing is," I said, "I don't really hang out with anybody at my job now. At The Old Network, I felt like I made real friends. Now, I'm not as interested. I don't go to happy hours as much as I should. I just don't care as much. There's a baseball game outing this month..."

"But it's all a lot of effort," J said.

"Exactly," I said. "It's like, I have enough of a hard time keeping up with my relationship, my family, and the friends that I already have. I don't want to meet any new people."

"Yeah, I don't want to meet any new people either," J said. He's married with two kids and lives by the beach in a lovely house in Connecticut, the lucky bastard.

"Maybe it's the stage of life we're in."

"It's the stage of life. It reminds me of this Sinbad routine where he says, you only need two people in your life: one to look in the window to make sure you're still breathing, and one to call 911." A Sinbad reference: impressive.

I laughed. "Yeah. Or, did you watch Six Feet Under? There's a scene where Brenda says, 'I always thought that as I got older, I'd have more people around me.'"

The actual scene I was trying to conjure goes like this (with thanks to this blog):

brenda: i always thought that i would have more people in my life as time went on.

billy: hmmph… doesn't work that way.

brenda: yeah. i’m starting to realize that.

billy: its almost like as we get older, the number of people who completely get us shrinks.

I've met my share of people who "get" me, along with my share of people who don't get me (or whom I do not get) but are grandfathered in because we met at a time of life when shared experiences, a certain sensibility and sheer availability threw us together.

I like to think that maybe (maybe?) there are a few more of both types of people in my future. They're just fewer and farther between.

Music: "Another Day"

Pound Foolish.

"Hey, can I interrupt for one second?" Coworker 1 approaches my desk, where I am sitting down and showing Coworker 2 something on my computer.

Coworker 1 wants to thank me for the help I gave her in setting up a hub for some space shuttle launch coverage.

"Oh sure, no problem. I hardly did anything," I said.

"No but you gave me the foundation for understanding the code and everything, which was hugely helpful," she said. "So, thank you so much."

She is about to turn and leave, but as she does so, she reaches out her hand (which also has a lace glove on it). She is loosely making a fist. I sit there and stare. I do not know this person very well, and would not have pegged her as the fist-bump type, but then she's wearing lace gloves, so she's already a game-changer here. Or maybe she's going for a "gimme five"?

I am terrible at interpreting gestures. Unless you're flipping me the bird or attempting to start a round of clapsies, there's only a 40 percent chance that I'm going to understand your meaning. High-five attempts terrify me. I can even mess up handshakes. Rather than express this in the moment -- pause, ask for clarification, offer a quizzical look -- I try to play along and inevitably err on the side of being embarrassing.

So despite the fact that I have no idea what's going on here, especially with the gloves partly obscuring her hands, I decide to be game and return what I deem to be a fist-bump. "No!" she says, shaking her hand and opening her fingers, and I realize that she actually has something in her hand that she is trying to give me. It's a souvenir from the shuttle launch.

So I have done two things: I have assaulted her with an unwanted fist-pound, and I also suggested that *I* am a fist-pound type, which I am NOT. And I did this in full view of a witness.

God that was awkward. That is going to haunt my Monday.

Update: I have been informed that this gesture is also called a dap. There are also other definitions of "dap" on the Urban Dictionary page for it that are similarly unappealing.

Too Much?

So, for the last 24 hours or so, I've been intermittently listening to a podcast called The Lavender Hour, which is basically what happens when two people say, OMG our conversations are so entertaining, we should just tape them and put them on the Internets, only instead of just talking about it, they actually do it.

I found it because I had just watched Duncan Trussell in Drunk History Vol. 6 and was curious about who he is. The Internet didn't really have an answer for this question, but it did have the Lavender Hour, which Trussell co-hosts with his comedian friend.

Do you ever find yourself mesmerized by a piece of entertainment without even knowing why? Like, I'm not really laughing out loud here, and I'm not sure I even get where these people are coming from at all, but this speaks to me on some unfathomable level (or, alternatively, I just need more of a life), so I am just listening to it anyway. It's like... company. That's how I feel about the show Portlandia: There are a few sequences that I find hilarious, and then the rest of it I just sort of watch because I just inexplicably want to be there.

So but the thing about Lavender Hour episode that I listened to was that at times, I had to skip through because they were working so blue that I couldn't take it. Like, jokes about malls and dad-wear and the Cheesecake Factory, of course. But jokes about rape and anal sex...oh my delicate ears.

It was my own fault that I turned from this to the show Louie in search of something a bit lighter. And once again I found myself alternately amused and nauseated. I hit "pause" at about the point where someone was talking about rubbing a "smelly little cock" all over a woman's "depressing tits."

This experience -- of going from amused to perplexed to outright disgusted/traumatized and back again -- seems to be much more common now than it used to be. Remember when Eddie Murphy was edgy? It reminds of the moment at 1:28 in this interview with Charlie Sheen where he has just spewed out some craziness and breaks the frame for a moment to ask, "Too much?" It was such a genius wink at the audience in a time where everyone was just loving Crazy Charlie Sheen. But ultimately, yes, it was too much. Who wants to watch an id in overdrive for more than five minutes?

I don't know. It's not that I want everything to be squeaky clean. I would just like people to err on the side of restraint and be more creative rather than going for the shocking laugh, because these people are talented enough that they don't need it. But the real UncMo here is not the comedy itself but that a) I can't make this point in a sharper way right now and b) I sound like Grandma (or Bill Cosby). But I mean does anyone share my dismay?

When You're Explaining, You're Losing.

It's been awhile. That's not because I have lacked for Uncomfortable Moments. It's because I have lacked for discipline.

Tonight I was walking along P Street by myself, having deposited a check at the Citibank branch on Connecticut Avenue and 18th, and moving toward Whole Foods. Once again, it was past dinnertime and I was trying to figure out what to have for dinner on this Friday night alone.

And I was talking to myself. Sometimes an internal monologue becomes so strong that I have to mouth it to myself. I wasn't talking audibly, but that didn't make me look any less crazy. I was sensible of this and trying to confine my murmurings to points along the sidewalk where there was no one else around.

Until -- shit -- I failed to take in the periphery and saw that a twentysomething guy with a baseball cap on backwards had a perfect vantage point of my crazy from a stoop where he sat with a companion.

I looked up too late -- and immediately stopped my lips from moving. Acted like I was normal. Nothing to see here!

He smiled. I was busted. As if to make it worse, he said, "Hi," as I passed by. Like, "Hi, I totally caught you talking to yourself," was the subtext. "Hi, I totally know," was the subtext of my response. I moved along, mortified.

Why was I talking up such a blue streak? It started with "How Divorce Lost Its Groove," an article by divorce artist Pamela Paul, in The New York Times. A few related conversations later, I was revisiting my whole split. Again.

I find myself trying, over and over again, to tell my "story." Why did I get married? Why did I divorce? What happened?

I know his story is very different from mine. And that makes it even harder. Why can't our stories be the same? Can I see his story, understand it? Could there ever be a version that we'd both agree on?

I'm not even going to get into the Pamela Paul article. That's a whole other post. My ex hated Pamela Paul, and I actually found myself wondering what he would say. I will just submit that no one decides not to get divorced because it's not as cool as it was in the '70s (and I doubt it was really that cool in the '70s).

Anyway, back to P Street. I continued on, mortified and reminding myself that I really needed to get a grip. I told my significant other what happened. You know, the talking to myself part.

"It was a big moment in your life," he said. "Just let the feeling pass through."

That's when I realized -- and this is related to the Pamela Paul -- women are charged with explaining shit all day long. (Yes, I know, vast generalization, there are lots of exceptions.) There is a ton of accounting and judgment, no matter your relationship status. We analyze stuff with each other: There has to be a storyline. Justifications. Most of Paul's article involves women spinning their stories.

Guys don't explain anything. Do you think that, when a dude gets divorced, he sits with his friends over beers hashing it all out for awhile? Explaining what happened? I'm going to guess in most cases, no. Yet three years later, I am still confronting this decision and trying to account for it -- wanting to account for it -- with others, and with myself. But the story, with all its fine-tunings and new insights, doesn't change anything.

When I got to the store I bought some lamb loin chops on sale. I cooked those up for myself -- just me. My guy (damn, I hate the word boyfriend) doesn't eat lamb. I have heard people say that they don't cook very often because they're usually alone. I used to feel that way too -- and certainly if I wanted some nice cut of meat, I'd accept that it would have to wait until that far-off, undetermined day where maybe I'd be in a restaurant and maybe they'd have just what I wanted on the menu. I couldn't spend that kind of money/make that kind of effort just for myself.

Now I feel that being alone is all the more reason to cook. Because what are you waiting for? Make a gourmet meal for yourself, and talk to yourself freely. Who cares. Drink some very good wine. Slowly. Watch In Treatment, or Breaking Bad or The Bachelorette or some other equally dark, depressing show that no one wants to watch with you. Light a candle, because now your place smells like meat, and you have all these candles that you buy and never light. And try to drop the story.

So that's what I did. I don't know if I have cured myself from explaining. But I have started trying.

Music: "Dancing With Myself"

The Trouble With Women.

The no. 5 most-popular headline today at The Washington Post was "The Trouble With Men."

Well played, WaPo, well played. Even a media cynic like me, hardened as I am to cheap headline ploys, had trouble resisting such an invitation.

Sure, I have my own ideas about the trouble with men (chafing stubble; blind, universal devotion to Zooey Deschanel, AC/DC and Monty Python; cigars; a weird need to beat each other up, even when they like each other), but I wanted to see what someone else thought. (As an aside, I'm going to start using this headline technique more often, starting with the title of this post!)

It turned out that the column was as easy as the headline: Let's use the Schwarzenegger and IMF chief scandals to make generalizations about men and cheating, complete with a humdinger of an opening: "What is it with men and sex?"

As an intro to incisive social commentary, that seems comparable to "What is it with humans and breathing?" or "What is it with puppies and chew toys?" or "What is it with teenage girls and boy bands?" I mean, do you really need to break it down?

The troubles with this column are many. First of all, it lumps together consensual infidelity with an alleged (and it's important to say alleged, even though the column basically convicts "DSK" anyway) rape. The justification for that gross oversimplification is that both incidents supposedly demonstrate male abuse of power.

The fact that this "abuse of power" conceit was derived from statements by the writer's wife does not mitigate its inherent sexism. He lumps together Schwarzenegger, Mark Sanford, Bill Clinton, John Ensign, John Edwards and Newt Gingrich as examples of power abusers. Does anyone think that Rielle Hunter was "taken advantage of"? Or Mark Sanford's lover? Do we need to assume that, whenever a prominent man commits adultery, the women involved are powerless and naive?

Of course, men in power have a long history of exploiting women, either criminally or morally, which is why this line of reasoning is both facile and cheap. To blame these recent scandals on a disease of the modern "alpha male" is ridiculous. Chris Rock put it more succinctly and more scarily (at the 2:10 mark): "A man is basically as faithful as his options." The men Mark Miller cites were weak, and allowed circumstances to triumph over morals; but they weren't necessarily predators, nor can their lovers be characterized across the board as victims.

However, a recent study suggests that Miller does have reason to link power with infidelity. Apparently, both women and men who consider themselves to be the shit are more likely to be cheating fools. We just don't see this played out publicly as much among women in power. More often, we see women in power (Oprah, Hillary) portrayed as closeted lesbians or asexual.

Miller's column neglects to mention several mostly non-political scandals, such as those of Tiger Woods and Jesse James (or, if he wanted to cite criminal cases, Kobe Bryant and Eliot Spitzer). To me, what's salient about these stories is not so much that the men are cheating or the idea that they are abusing power. It's the fact that they have created such huge schisms between their public and personal lives, and also, in some cases, the apparent indulgence in unprotected sex. Dudes, why, especially when you are cheating, so much unprotected sex?

Women are cheating, too. Are they also resorting to illegal and dangerous means? Why does anyone of either gender, -- in an age of supposed sexual liberation, gender equality, psychological enlightenment and oversharing -- still feel the need to commit such destructive clandestine behavior? To me, these are much more compelling topics to explore than the sadly well trodden ground of "hey, men sleep with underlings and commit sex crimes."

Music: "Creep"

Betrayed.

Hello, friends. How is spring treating you?

I decided to usher in the season by: sneezing copiously, bitching about the unseasonably cold weather in D.C., wearing compression stockings (which is a separate post) and getting a "Sun Safety Kit" from Sephora. "Sun Safety Kit" translates to "lots of beauty samples that seem like a bargain but probably are not and yet are irresistible."

For those of you who have actually seen me, it might surprise you to know that I have a beauty product addiction. Nonetheless, it's true. It's built into my DNA. My childhood memories involve my mother transforming herself via drawers full of cosmetics before meeting my dad for their nights out at Houlihan's in Chevy Chase. Where Proust's key sense memory was of madeleines, I remember Oscar de la Renta perfume. I liked to waltz in while she was getting ready and say, "Hi, Tammy Faye."

To this day, she has drawers and carousels booming with products, and is a V.I.B. (Very Important Beauty Insider, i.e. prime spender) at Sephora. And though Sephora is truly genius at marketing products, my mom has sold me (a mere Beauty Insider) more things than any Sephora salesperson ever would or could. (Me: "I want this Tokidoki emery board set, but it seems so silly." Her: "Why? You know, that's about the same price as you would pay in the drugstore for emery boards. And you know you'll use them. Oh, I like that case!")

Yes, I'll do the frivolous Tokidoki and the high-end skincare products and the Nars makeup that somehow evinces a lifestyle I no longer live. But kits and "deluxe samples" are my drug of choice. They allow you to flirt with various brands without really committing. They give you the quick hit in a world of long, plodding commitments to lotions and powders that overstay their welcome and sit silently judging you for leaving them to languish in the drawer. "I cost $28 and you loved me two years ago! Why are you letting me go to waste? I won't be ignored, Christina..."

I wasn't always this promiscuous. For a long time, I felt very loyal to Shiseido. That's because, when I was about 15, my mom took me to the Shiseido counter at Woodward and Lothrop (or Woodies, as it was known) in Montgomery Mall, where we got a consultation and subsequently bought some products. I underwent the "Makeup Simulator," which was very high-tech in the olden times, also known as the '80s.

It was all so seductive. Firstly, it was adult. As a teenager, I was being invited into the world of mature secrets, which for women involves various sera, tonics and masques (that's with a "que") of indeterminate but significant value. Second of all, it involved transformation, which is something any teenager desperately, desperately wants, especially if her looks are plain and her bangs are -- well, you can see the picture. Third of all, there were many smells, which in my experience is second nature to women but seems to confuse men. Fourth of all, it involved lists and cataloguing: My needs were boiled down to checkboxes such as "enchanting eyes" and "a touch of color."

Shiseido was my first.

Everything about the brand corresponds to what's appealing about many Japanese things: simple, beautiful packaging; the evocation of purity, of being immaculate; not too little, not too much; a sense of science uniting with nature. (Similarly, Tokidoki, which is a Japanese name but an American company, represents the other side of what's appealing about many Japanese things: cartoony, childlike packaging; mini, mini, mini; totally artificial.)

That's why it's sad to find myself estranged from Shiseido now that we have more information about what we are putting onto our skin every day, thanks to the Environmental Working Group and others. Of the 50+ Shiseido items in EWG's Cosmetics Database, none falls into the "green" range. It has not signed the Compact for Safe Cosmetics, and apparently it conducts tests on animals.

To be honest, I haven't been super attuned to the animal-testing issue. I have been super attuned to the human-testing issue. I am convinced that the epidemic of cancer in women is linked to the beauty industry. I have no scientific proof for this. It's just common sense. The only way we can protect ourselves is to avoid products that we know to be toxic.

I bought my last Shiseido product several months ago. Unfortunately, we've grown apart, and it's time to break up.

Music: "Mirror in the Bathroom"

Tracks of My Tears.

This recent piece on crying in public in The New York Times struck a chord. In the past I have noted that one of the advantages to living in New York is that you can cry with impunity on the streets. No one will care.

The writer of the NYT piece, Melissa Febos, also raises another public UncMo: tripping on the street. The public wipeout elicits a different response from open weeping: you’re more likely to be ignored on the latter, and you want to be ignored; but with tripping, people usually reach out -- and if they don't, you feel even worse. Somehow, this unspoken rule makes perfect sense.

I don’t cry while going about my business in public these days as much as I used to. There are many possible reasons for this: I don’t live in New York anymore, I’m not an emotional wreck of a twentysomething anymore, I have developed a new inner strength, and/or some tender, precious part of me has simply died. Take your pick. But on a recent day, a freight train of tears hit me, and it would not be deterred by the presence of strangers’ eyes.

It started in a yoga class, at the very end. There is a part in many of the classes between the resting period and sitting up, where the teacher tells us to roll onto our right sides and pause there. This is where I’m mostly likely to tear up, or want to. It’s a fetal position, and to me, there are only two things you do in a fetal position: sleep, or sob.

On this particular day, I couldn’t hold it back at fetal time. I’d been fussing and fighting the whole week, and it all finally overtook me. I barely got my quivering lip through the last of the class and had to turn to the corner of the room at the end. Hard to tell if anyone saw me. If they did, they decided to let me alone.

The jag continued along P Street as I walked to the grocery store. I once again composed myself (sort of) before walking into the store (because somehow, crying on the street is more OK than crying in an indoor public place) and walked up to one of the counters to get some meat. The guy took my order, and as he was wrapping the meat, he said, "Are you OK?"

I hadn’t expected this – I mean I knew I didn’t look OK, but in a city (and especially if you’ve trained in public crying in New York), you aren’t prepared to be called out on it. "Yeah," I said.

This did not satisfy him. "Are you sure?" he said.

I repeated the lie, but by this point the tears were coming again, because my pitiful guts had been reflected back to me, and there was no stuffing them back in now. But I wasn’t exactly going to get into a heart to heart on the spot with the meat guy. I wasn’t even capable of saying, "No, it's been a rough day." So instead, I said the thing that was completely untrue, but also less likely to increase my visibility. Another rule of public crying: As long as you don’t make contact with anyone, or acknowledge that anyone can see you, you are invisible.

I took my purchase from him, corners of my mouth turned down, eyes watering, feeling that I was now not only pitiful, but a closed-off liar. I weeped on through the rest of the store, getting it together for the cashier and promising myself I would really let it out when I got home. And here's where another truism about public crying comes into play: When you're finally in private and have the freedom to let it all out, you can't anymore.

There are many times I’m publicly happy, too: laughing or smiling to myself while I’m alone. But I get more self-conscious about that than I do about crying or looking sad. After all, I don’t want to seem crazy or something.

Music: "Tracks of My Tears"