It Looked Different on the Model: Epic Tales of Impending Shame and Infamy

I could have spent my time hugging you or I could have spent my time telling you not to touch hot stoves or take candy from men. Which did you want?

I have more faith in my bra than I have in my accountant.

I could croak with no warning, and the only tragedy anyone would experience would be showing up on the last day of my estate sale simply to discover that all remaining items had copious amounts of dog hair on them.

Suddenly, however, the dastardly department of my personality presented two plans, one of which involved dynamite, mustache wax, some rope, and train tracks . . . which I rejected due to financial investment.

As a result of that experience, I do think all Anthropologies should provide a courtesy volcano just outside their dressing rooms so every woman who is revealed as completely inadequate by the lighting can throw herself in rather than contaminate the store staging for any longer than absolutely necessary.

Once I had been jerked back to reality, like I was in a log on Splash Mountain and someone quickly applied the brakes, I knew this had been a terrible choice, but I was in it now. There was no getting out; there was no abandoning the mission.

I totally deserved this, I realized. I deserved to get captured in this shirt. I was roped in like a calf. Stupid. So stupid. Just because it was on sale, I had to try on a baby shirt. This was so completely my fault. Maybe I should go to Baby Gap tomorrow and try to get into some Onesies or a romper. What was I thinking? Really?

Now, I'm sure you are thinking, were they really children, or were they adults who hadn't eaten protein or calcium in so many years that their bone structure was actually in an advanced state of atrophy and they appeared much smaller than people who eat food?

And you know, I really have to say this: If your baby isn't even in the room and you can't bear to come equipped with a blanket, kindly put your boob away in its rightful compartment. Don't leave it hanging out for ten to fifteen minutes at a barbecue like you're waiting for someone to hang a Christmas ornament on it.

I do not come from a family of singers. When we get together and warble "Happy Birthday" to one another over cake and candle, it doesn't sound as much like a song as it does a pack of jackals yapping over a fresh carcass. And in my case, it's nothing that you want to inflict on the innocent, or at least on people who haven't reported us to the city yet. Who is flat, off-key or tone deaf in the Notaro clan is all up in the air--it doesn't matter, and we can't tell, anyway.

In the Anthropologie mirror, I saw wrinkles, dents, flaps, bumps, and something that caused me to say to myself, “I hope that’s a tumor and not a horn.

I realized that you don't try on a pair of pants, fart in them, and then put them back on the shelf, and the same rough politeness applied here, too. Plain and simple, I bled on it, I bought it.