unicorn

I was sitting on my bed, wondering if one day I will wake up to discover that all my hair has fallen out (seriously: I shed like a mohair goat and at a certain point it’s just all going to run out), when my BBFF called, upset: “I need you to go online,” she said.

This seemed like a better thing to do then worry about my hair, so I did, and read this, as she asked me to. “Everyone I know is talking about it.”

I read it. Generally, in sum, a young man appears to have written something he found important about the so-called virtues of female sexual propriety. “This is obviously a joke,” I said. “No one’s this stupid.”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “People I know seem to be taking it very seriously.”

“But honestly, dude,” I said. “It like literally does not even make sense. I mean, literally.”

Women see us drool over that hot girl that is standing half naked in her default picture or see us go wild when we easily get the number to a hot girl we just met on the street. To a man’s perception this seems “right” because it’s exactly what we want: sex without much effort. But for women from the outside looking in, they think that this is what we want, and it skews their perception.

“This is written by someone who has not graduated from high school yet. Or it’s a joke.”

“What is your biggest fear in life?” she asked.

“I have a million biggest fears in life,” I said, “but the one I’m thinking about right now is all my hair falling out.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “My biggest fear is my daughter—I mean, did you see the part about the kindergarten?”

The truth of the matter nowadays is that good girls, as we like to call them, don’t really exist. They are unicorns. You are lucky if you come across one that is actually who she says she is. We sometimes even joke that our future wives are currently in Kindergarten because it is comforting to know that she is currently playing with blocks and not swinging from dick to dick because they sell her a good enough story. And when she’s 18 we’ll snap her right up and she’ll have no exposure to being a slut.

“Jesus Christ, Laura,” I said. “This was written by someone without any sense of how to built a sentence together. Like, by some idiot drunk guy at a bar who everyone hates because he won’t shut up, only this one had an iPhone. You can’t take this seriously.”

“But the things behind it are true. There are asshole guys out there who might judge Ashley [that's her daughter] and that is not acceptable!”

“But Ashley’s only like three months old.”

“Which means this douchebag is going to be coming after her in four years! What am I going to tell her?

So we talked it out. We read, and admired, the spirited rebuttal of this essay/word vomit at Jezebel, but in my opinion, it didn’t go far enough. It’s worth reading in its entirety, and I read its central point as this: Women should not give a fuck about what men think about what they do with their bodies. I think we need to make that argument even bigger: Women should not give a fuck about what anyone thinks about how they spend one second of their days.

Seriously. Make a list of three people who care for you, comfort you, respect you and admire you. Care what they think (and by the way—that doesn’t mean to do what they say. Only to care what they think.) Do not care, ever, what anyone else thinks. Take what you can from their counsel and thank them for it and dismiss the rest. For me personally: I am an exceptionally conservative person in many ways, but I travel as much as I can, often by myself. I don’t like to go to brunch. I’m happy single and I’m happy in a relationship. If someone dropped a baby off at my house, I’d probably feed it, and change it, and I would welcome the chance to take it to Mozambique to live on a beach and help me catch fish, but if someone doesn’t, in fact, drop a baby off at my house, I’m not going to freak out about it.

Do this often enough, be like this often enough—do what you want, rather than what everyone expects you to do—and you may be shocked, like I was, at the reaction: You will piss people off. I had no idea that would happen: I mean, seriously, what does anyone care if I go to Paris or Brazil for two months, beyond the people who have to dial three extra numbers to get me on the phone? Let me tell you: It’s unbelievable, the number of people who give a fuck how you spend your time—chiefly when they have no control over how they spend their own. I’ve been at this long enough that at this point, I just say to myself—when I hear that a distant relative or a friend’s mom or some girl from my old job is talking about what a “bohemian” (not meant in a nice way) I am, I say … actually, I don’t say anything. I think a little bit more about all my hair falling out and then I wonder why some people waste their time and energy being jealous when they work jobs they hate, fail to pursue the things they might really like, and waste their time in relationships with people they never have and never will love. And then I think about what to have for lunch.

Of course, of course, this is true for how women act sexually. Like I said, I’m, personally, a conservative person. Or at least a private one. The one point I take from the piece that launched this conversation is that some women, sometimes, act in a way they wouldn’t otherwise to get the attention of men [who are probably douchebags].

This argument splits in two right here. If you want to be a non-monogamous, anything-goes, ultra-libidinous goddess of sex: more power to you. Thank God for you. I love you. We are, all of us, on a spectrum, and if that’s your place on it: Thank God for all of us, and our different preferences and stories and experiences and all of that. But here’s the other side of that argument: I will hope that my little goddaughter Ashley isn’t too frequently in a position where she pretends to be anything other than what she is. If she’s a prude (hey: nothing wrong with that, either) pretending to be a non-monogamous, anything-goes, ultra-libidinous goddess of sex to earn the attentions of some guy [who is probably a douchebag], I will hope she doesn’t do that often, and I will hope she grows out of it. Because she should just be whatever she is, and everyone else can just fuck off.

I honestly think that the most important thing I’ve ever learned as an adult is that no one’s opinion matters as much as my own. (Well, maybe my parents’, but that’s perhaps because they’re usually right and they’re extremely laissez-faire.) It sounds arrogant. You know what? There are worse things. If all of us women believed that, I think we would be blown away by all the amazing shit we could do.

lake district sheep

Not long ago, I went to the Lake District in England to hike as much as possible, and to put as much literal distance as I could between myself and a job that had become the kind of bad fit that involves a surfeit of tears and cursing. (I say that, P.S., having just screamed “FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK” after spilling a plastic tray of “hors d’oeuvres” of turkey, olives and cheese on the floor and knowing I couldn’t avoid cleaning it up, which I would have if I could have.)

Anyway: the Lake District. It is fucking beautiful, and it is a really, really good place to be if you like hiking, by yourself. The “by yourself” part is key, because I do like to do it, but not more than I dislike being attacked by drug addicts in the forest. The Lake District is like Disney World for English “walkers” (LOL: not zombies), and one of the best things about it, besides its beauty, is the fact that you’re never alone for long, which is convenient if, like me, you also do not like criminals, especially on deserted trails, far from a phone signal and policepeople.

On my second day there (third day: the actual second day, it rained an inch and a half), I was hiking a mountain known as Helm Crag. I like to hike alone, and I like to hike fast, because it makes me feel like a bad ass, like Linda Connor in Terminator. (More or less.) At one point, on a series of steps (steps, not switchbacks, because the English are so English about things sometimes) I passed a man, maybe in his 60s, talking to a couple. See you later, I thought. Not long after, he passed me. Well, I thought. That’s just fine. The steps were steep, and he was fast.

I took 20 minutes at the summit to take pictures, so the next time I spotted him, he was probably a quarter-mile ahead of me, eating his lunch (as it turned out, a sandwich and a protein bar.) I caught up. “You’re moving pretty good,” he said. He didn’t seem like a rapist, so I talked to him. His name was Tony. He was 78, and he and his wife came to the Lake District every autumn to walk as much as possible. He did Helm Crag first, he said, to get a sense of how well he was moving, relative to years past. Also, he was breaking in some new waterproof boots.

Because I was far from home and alone and he seemed non-violent, I fell in step with him—a fortunate thing, since the trail markings on the top of the ridge we were following were next to non-existant, rubbed out by mud and sheep with no concern for our navigation problems. (Without him, I would have ended up like I would a few days later, on another ridgeline, walking miles out of my way and only finding my path home when, from above, I spotted a particularly distinct-looking tarn I had hiked to the previous day.) I let him talk, and he was well worth listening to. He and his wife lived in York. He had lived in Nigeria in his 20s and played semi-professional rugby when not racing horses. He worked for a women’s clothing store and attended fashion fairs in Frankfurt and Barcelona. (“See! That’s something else we have in common!” when we realized that we both sort of worked in fashion, after concluding that his wife Ann and I had roughly the same endocrinological problem.) After nimbly crossing a stream on a succession of flat, wet rocks, he shook his head when I stubbornly stuck my feet directly into the water: no slipping that way. Slipping on a rock was my biggest fear in the Lake District, since everything was wet, all the time, and on my own, it could leave me stuck where I fell, for God knew how long. He quickened our pace when I told him I needed to be back in my cottage to begin working at the start of the U.S. workday. When we said our goodbyes, they were English, not American: Quick, unapologetic. There were no promises to stay in touch or befriend each other on Facebook. I hoped I would see him again. I did not expect to.

A few days later, someone rang my doorbell. Now, I was in the Lake District. No one knew me or where I was; I had only just disconnected the phone in the cottage: It wasn’t for me. I froze. I couldn’t turn out my lights, which would be an obvious signal to the intruder that I was home, so I crawled into my bed and waited for whoever it was to leave. Then, a couple minutes later, someone knocked on my door. Still, I waited. Then: “Diane? It’s Tony!” I opened the door. “Hello!” I said, hoping no one would say anything about my hiding in my room, and then thought: They’re English. For an American who has just done something embarrassing, there are few things nicer than the English proclivity for not pointing out an unpleasantness.

Tony had figured out where I was staying—Grasmere was a very small village—and brought his wife Ann, so we could talk about our medical conditions. I sat on the stop of my cottage—I couldn’t let them inside, the floor was covered in muddy clothing and potato-chip wrappers and God knew what else—and told her what I knew. I brought out my orange prescription bottles and she carefully wrote down the names of my prescriptions. At a certain point, one of them said something about it being a bit weird, sitting in the hallway of my building, and we went into my room. “I forbid you,” Tony said, as I started to pick up my laundry. Ann and Tony sat in the two armchairs, me on my bed. They seemed very much in love. I desperately wanted them to be my grandparents.

Literally across the street (read: lane) from my cottage, there was a tea room called Baldry’s, and at it, they served the most delicious food to be served anywhere for 20 miles, and I say that as someone who would quite happily subsist on a diet of Gu if it were more socially acceptable: hot chocolate topped with actual whipped cream, scones, homemade butter. Every afternoon I would go there and order the exact same meal (what I’ve just listed, plus a salad.) The waiters were the kind of waiters who would say “Fuck me” when a crowd of a half-dozen walkers poured in 20 minutes before closing time. Basically, it was heaven, and before I met Ann and Tony, it was my favorite thing about the Lake District. In relegating Baldry’s to second place, I remembered something I seem condemned to relearn, over and over: No matter how many beautiful hikes, inspiring peaks, Cham ruins, Shinto temples, Elizabethan castles, palm-fringed beaches, Guggenheims, Louvres, city parks, country parks, helicopter rides, oceanside nightclubs, winery tastings, all the shit we read about and I write about for travel magazines, five-star restaurants, five-star hot chocolates: Nothing encountered on a trip will ever mean more than the right people, at the right time, in the right place. The people are always, every time, what matters, what is remembered, and what is worth going back for.

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P.S. I don’t think I look much like this picture, but that’s exactly how I remember Tony.

I could seriously watch this 1000X today.

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I love making up little rules for myself when I travel, even if I’m weak-willed enough to break most of them. (“Just 30 minutes more Internet time and then I’ll go outside.”) There is, though, one rule I come back to, over and over again, and it’s flexible enough that it can be applied to almost any travel quandary I have, and point a way forward: Be where you are. I often do not be where I am: I often be where I was, or where I am going, or where I wish I were. I have more trouble with being where I am. It is, though, something that offers incremental rewards: Even if I can’t be 100% faithful to it, 100% of the time, I find that it rewards me as much as I can be. So I come back to it, in all different kinds of situations, and it usually has something to suggest.

I totally get it if someone just wants to conk out on vacation: That’s why they call it vacation, and that’s why God created delicious tropical drinks that are even better when they include coconut and mini umbrellas. I have been on the sort of vacation where you don’t even leave the hotel because—the outside world. Who needs it?

Generally, though, I like to travel, rather than vacation. Vacation is expensive, and can get a bit repetitive; travel, I think, can be self-sustaining, and is always interesting, even when it is awful, even when it is Thanksgiving and you’ve spent the last 20 hours throwing up all over the floor of a hotel bathroom in Laos and then took an amazing, nine-hour bus ride to another part of the country, by which time you’d recovered just enough to have one bite of apple pie before throwing up again. (LOL: Thanksgiving 2009, it was awesome!)

Anyway: This is how I try to get as close to an authentic, or at least somewhat informed, trip as I can.

P.S. I just met someone (not American, not Brazilian) who said he formed his primary opinion of American women through watching Sex and the City repeats in Poland, and I was like, dude, at least watch Girls.

My list:

1. There is never a good reason to go to Starbucks outside our borders.* If there isn’t a better local cafe in the city you’re visiting, you may need to change cities.

2. There is rarely a good reason to go to McDonald’s outside our borders. (That said, I once saw a McDonald’s in Beijing after four weeks in Russia and Mongolia and almost cried as I ordered my Chicken McNuggets and French fries. With happiness, to be clear.) Still.

3. There is absolutely never a good reason to go all the way to New York City and spend half your shopping money at American Eagle, Hollister, Sephora, or any other store you have at your local mall. This is true in all cases except for the four-story Times Square Forever 21 that’s open until midnight, because that one is an only-in-New York Spectacular, and Spectaculars are always fair play.

4. There’s no reason to go all the way to Europe to shop at H&M if you live within 300 miles of an H&M in America.

5. There is no reason to go all the way to Europe and buy American brands at twice the price and three times the hassle of carrying it home.

6. Before you get on the plane, pick 10 phrases and keywords in the language in which you are about to be immersed, and memorize them. My favorites are: “Thank you,” “Sorry,” “Yes,” “No,” “Excuse me,” “Where are the bathrooms?” “How much does this cost?” “May I have the bill?” “Is there wifi here?” and “What time does this store close?”

7. There is no small thrill in being able to communicate an idea in an unfamiliar language (honest to God I got the woman at the juice bar tonight to understand that I wanted my acai “to go” and felt like I’d won a Nobel prize.) Rosetta Stone costs about four times as much as it should but has good pronunciation drills. Duolingo is fun and free and nearly as good. And there are teenagers and college students worldwide looking to pay their rent by speaking in their native language to you over Skype for $25 an hour.

8. While you’re on your trip, make a point of learning at least one new word every day and use it in conversation at least three times the following day, even if it is completely obvious you are shoehorning the word “senha” into your convo with the waiter for no particular reason.

9. Forget working out in the hotel gym, which is nearly always sad. What can be a total drudge—keeping up a workout while you’re on vacation—can be an awesome way to experience a place. I’ve done beach-running in Rio, hiking in the Alps in Switzerland, and 10-mile walks along National Trail in Britain. And the best thing is, they were all free.

10. Pick up a pedometer and see how many steps you take on a normal day. (My number when I worked an office job was disturbingly low—sometimes under 4000.) If it’s under 10,000, try to double it each day of vacation. You’ll get to see loads more up close and personal, and go back to your routine healthier than you left it.

11. Figure out three definitive movies from the country where you’re visiting and Netflix them. For Brazil, I watched Central Station (awesome), Bus 174 (disturbing), and Elite Squad 2 (ditto). Rough Guides always has really good suggestions, or you can Google that country’s recent Oscar submissions.

12. If you’re too tuckered out to move one night, spend an evening not downloading American TV but watching local TV, even if you can’t understand a word. If nothing else, it should reinforce the fact that everyone, worldwide, loves a talent show.

13. Use Spotify to figure out the top 10 songs where you’re headed. The results may be shocking.

14. Google “best [destination country] book 2012″ and if it’s available in translation, read it.

15. Google “best poem [language of destination] [country of destination]” and find a few that have been translated to English. Pick one that might have some sort of relevance and commit the first 10 lines to memory. I was at the gym, weirdly enough, watching the Brazilian version of Sportscenter, when they showed this tiny little poem (which apparently they thought had something to do with soccer): “Quem tem alma nao tem calma.” Which means (very roughly) “He who has soul lacks calm.” Lovely!

16. Figure out the classic English-language travelogue for where you’re headed. When I was headed to the Balkans last year, it was Rebecca West’s “Black Lamb and Gray Falcon.”

17. Go somewhere only the bus goes. Lots of attractions are only reachable by rental car—which can be (a) stressful and (b) expensive—or by bus, rather than train, which is usually faster and easier. One bus-only example is Inhotim, which is this super awesome art place in the jungle near a city called Belo Horizonte. I find the bus like 90 times harder to deal with than anything else: There’s less chance of someone speaking English, more chance of having to communicate with the ticket agent, the driver, his conductor or ticket taker, whoever. But it was worth it.

18. Try a “private room” on Airbnb. Generally I prefer to get an “entire apartment” if I can afford it—I’ve found that there’s always something acceptable on there, and for way less than a hotel room—but I’ve come around to renting a room in an apartment and having temporary roommates for a couple days. I stick to apartments owned by women (no reason to tempt fate any more than necessary) and try it out on quick trips—maybe a weekend away. The prices, even in expensive cities, can be impossible to beat, except by a dorm bed in a hostel—which, by comparison, often offers the chance to meet people just like you, from the same place that you came from, getting the same drinks at the same bars you’d be going to at home. Which is not the point.

19. If at all possible, learn to drive a stick.

* Unless you need free wifi.

buzios praia brava

A very good, very old friend (relative to his relationship to me, not to the universe) recently asked me if I thought he should travel on a long—eight-week—trip by himself overseas. “Fuck yeah!” I said. This is an easy question. I literally am going to spend three hours figuring out what to have for lunch today (crepes? salad? fish? but the last time I had fish here it was coated in a half-inch of, like, puffy mayonnaise? so…crepes?)—but this one is easy. The answer is always, always yes.

“Wouldn’t I have a better time with a friend?” Oh, maybe, yes. But I’ve traveled with friends and ex-boyfriends all around, and one thing I am certain of is that there are some trips that not even the healthiest relationships could survive. I can say with complete faith that I will never, ever again do a two-month trip with a significant other unless we are both on significant dosages of Ambien. It’s like The Amazing Race: traveling as a couple becomes a referendum on your relationship, and soon you’re like, Do I really want to be with this person who feeds monkeys in such an incredibly annoying way?

Some trips demand a companion: A few years ago, I drove a manual-transmission car from London to Mongolia, and literally could not have made the trip without my friend Dave, not least because he could drive a stick and I can’t. It is better to see an elephant with someone else. In places where security is something you think about a lot, a friend can help deal with that. One thing’s for sure: Your relationship will not be in the same place as you began the trip. Maybe that’s great; maybe it really isn’t.

The biggest plus, though, is that you get to do whatever you want, all the time. I don’t think people often get to experience that level of … self-determination, and that’s just fine: The person who always gets her way is maybe not a super-nice person to be hanging out with. But while I believe in consensus-building, sometimes it’s nice to get what you want: if you want to stay in that neighborhood over that other one, eat at the same restaurant every night for three weeks, spend two hours at this one store and then go back in the morning if you still can’t decide which feathery thing to buy. Compromise is a virtue, but it’s a great one to leave at home, too.

Traveling solo also opens you up to a way-better experience as a visitor. Think about two people walking through a city at noon, obviously not at work: There’s probably a guy, and there’s probably a woman, and between them, there’s a backpack, a guidebook, and a shopping bag. I saw them every day on the sidewalks when I worked in SoHo, and they are unmistakably tourists. Someone walking by him or herself? That’s just a person, and depending on a variety of factors (where you are, your ethnicity and background, how you dress, stuff like that), you might pass for a local. That’s great if it happens.

Also, solo travelers open to new things—experiences, places, people—that you might not be otherwise. It’s the exact opposite of traveling in a relationship. If you’re in a not-so-amazing one, there’s a sense that any kind of new growth or interests on one party’s behalf can be incredibly threatening. That’s problematic.

On your own, you can try out new things—new yous, even—without worrying about how that impacts someone else and their opinion of you. And because trying new things tends to make us happy, that person we grow into is a happier version of ourselves. Who doesn’t want to be that? For me, anyway, there’s a reason I met my last three long-term boyfriends on a trip. Traveling solo is a shortcut to being my favorite self. And I told my friend that I was pretty sure it would work for him, too.

So I’m Brazil working on a writing project. (Also: drinking an unbelievable amount of mango juice, not speaking Portuguese incredibly well, getting all excited when I don’t get lost on the bus.) And because (as everyone knows) writers spend 98% of their time not writing, I thought about maybe trying to pitch some magazine stories while I’m here. And then I thought: That is a really bad idea.

For bazillion years (a standard unit of time, apparently), I made my living as a magazine writer, both on staff and freelance. This was, in many ways, an awesome thing, because I got to meet awesome people and ask them questions (Ryan Gosling, three times, is the highlight) and work with even more awesome people. In my experience, people who work at magazines are nearly always smart and funny. They are not always kind, but the ones that are are generally also smart and funny, so you have a recipe for the best people ever. I met a lot of them.

Magazine work is less good, I think, for writers. If writers actually want to be the editor of a magazine owned by someone else—then by all means, they should get an ASME internship at Conde, beg your way into an editorial assistant job, work your way up, enjoy lunch at the 4TS cafeteria, spend a lot of money on clothes (a professional requirement, no joke), and work their way up the ladder. I think, though, that if you want to write other things, like books, that magazine work is the absolute worst job in the world. Don’t get me wrong: It is fucking fun. At NYLON, I had a desk coated in free beauty products, I sat between two of the best people I’ve ever met, and I got to interview people I would otherwise have never met. But if you want to be a “real” writer, in my opinion, it’s both too close and too far: too close in that you always feel like you’re writing (but about someone else’s amazing project) and too far (because you’re not working on your own amazing project.) It’s not to say that magazines can’t be creative unto themselves—they 100% can be. (Have you read Lula? Or Frankie?) But unless you’re working at your own magazine (which I have done, will do in the future, and wholeheartedly endorse), you are probably spending 90 years trying to get one tiny creative idea approved. That is not a good use of time.

This brings me back to the best piece of writing advice I ever got. It was—bada bing: Don’t write for a living. At least, don’t sort-of write for a living. It came courtesy of, of all non-writing people, my computer science teacher at Columbia, who said, quite clearly: We don’t have to study (or work) what we love. That was him trying to convince me to switch from English to computer science—which, knowing what I know now, I would have done. (I would also have flunked out of school, but whatevs.)

I think it’s uniquely hard for writers to do this, because what we do lends itself so naturally to commercial applications (the difference, say, between writing prose poems and writing display copy for a story on crop tops is huge in some ways but quite small in others.) It is easy to be a “writer” without being the kind of writer you might have wanted to be. I don’t know—maybe this happens to, like, landscape architects who stumble into selling bouquets of chrysanthemums on the side of the road, but I sort of doubt it. But if I were starting out again, I would studiously avoid magazines. At least, magazines that I didn’t own. They’re buying a product. They will rewrite your work until you don’t recognize it. They will de-voice your content and replace it with their own—unless you have an extraordinarily deft and confident editor. And it’s easy for an ambitious person to watch this process and think: I really need to get better at this, and thus embark on a struggle that will not have a happy ending.

Did I mention that from pitch to paycheck, a year can pass?

Chekhov was a doctor. So was William Carlos Williams. Mario Puzo, for goodness sake, wrote The Godfather while working in a train yard.

I have a bit of perspective on this now. (Distance helps, with everything, but especially with perspective.) If I were talking to a younger writer—heck, if I were, like, talking to myself, because sometimes that’s a valuable thing to do—I would encourage myself to learn as much as possible about everything in the world, and explore that world, and challenge myself intellectually to do what did not come easily. (English majors = coming easily for writers.) It is easier to write about the world when you participate in that world, and devise a way to communicate your experiences of that world in an interesting and authentic way. (If you haven’t read this, read it.)

Don’t get me wrong. I love magazines, and under the right circumstances, I am truly wild about working for someone else. (That’s true even though I strongly believe people (especially women) should own their own ventures, as much as possible—we should own our ideas and profit from them, rather than selling them for pennies on the dollar.) I hope I will have a magazine job in the future that is as much fun as the ones I’ve had. But I hope most of all that I am lucky enough to swing into and out of that world, and when out of it, spend as much time as possible learning about other shit—enriching, weird, interesting shit, even if I don’t work in a train yard. I’m not sure how many more books the world needs about young people working at magazines. (And I say that literally having written one, and having felt kind of ashamed about it the entire time.)

Speaking of: If you haven’t read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, that book is famous for a reason. A day job and a room with a door on it. It’s taken me a long time to accept this, but now that I have them (an awesome day job and a room with a door, even if I would like it even more if it came with a better air conditioner), I see how easy they are, and what a world of difference they make.

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So: yay! It’s cold in New York City and the only reliably amazing thing about being a freelance writer is that you are not actually obligated to live in a particular place. (You are basically not obligated to ever get paid, by anyone, but that’s another story.) I’d never been to Brazil, so … fuck it! Why not, I think, is as good reason for any to buy a plane ticket for somewhere far away, and better than many others.

Rio, obviously, has its issues. At a certain point last week, I realized that I spent essentially 100% of my time Googling “is [fill in name of rio de janeiro neighborhood] safe.” This is the least fun form of Googling. It is actually less fun than the two hours I spent today Googling how to say things like “Do you stock the yellow fever vaccine?” in Portuguese at a public health clinic tomorrow, which is my little treat to myself since I was too idiotic to get it done in New York City.

 

Instagram Photo

The answer was usually no, in terms of the neighborhood safety issue. Of course, the answer is often “no” when people Google “is new york city safe,” which is an up-is-down, black-is-white situation if I ever heard one. (Safest big city in America, people!) I’m staying in a neighborhood called Arpoador (which for the entire first week here I called “Arproadoar” and have only correctly revised by thinking “Argo-a-door with a ‘P’”) and I started my time here by watching people walk by on the sidewalk after dark: Were women walking? (Yes.) Alone? (Yes.) Er, with their iPads and handbags and lots of jewelry? (Indeed.) After a week here, I don’t worry (er, knock on wood) about going outside at nine o’clock to get something to eat. I remember the first time I saw someone take out a Mac Book Air at a restaurant: You’re just like, OK, so not everything I’m reading online is 100% accurate.

One exception to the everyone-is-wrong-about-crime thing is Centro, the downtown neighborhood that’s packed on weekdays with busy worker bees (not literally bees) but, apparently, deserted and dangerous on weekends. I would have been quite happy to avoid it over the weekend—but I wanted to go to the Modern Art Museum in Niteroi (picture below and above), and the best way of getting there was by ferry—which, of course, left from Centro. The alternative was a bus (meh) or a taxi ($70).

So the ferry trip it was. But a DEFCON 5 ferry trip. I wore my leggings with the two hidden pockets: one for mugger’s cash, one for a credit card. I put my actual “walking around money” in my bikini top (which the salespeople loved when I removed it from my breast-area to pay for stuff, soaked in delicious bikini-top sweat). I left my real camera at home and brought just my phone, which fit into my leggings pocket. I didn’t carry anything outside a tiny map that I could fold into a square I could hide in my hand. I’m doing everything but those defensive maneuvers you see in action movies, where someone (stupid) is running in zig-zags to avoid an assassin shooting them—when I finally get to the ferry building and outside of it see a dozen people walking around with massive digital cameras hanging around their necks. They didn’t have signs around their necks saying “PLEASE STEAL FROM ME” but they might as well have. Honestly, I don’t think anyone should be robbed, but I almost robbed them.

Instagram Photo

This all made me think quite a bit about what it means to be a target in a neighborhood that’s supposed to be not particularly nice. I had read a lot of horror stories about people going to Centro and other neighborhoods and being mugged. If they were outfitted like the people I saw in Centro yesterday, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were mugged in SoHo. I’m going to keep on with my defensive measures, but I’m going to correspondingly expand my ideas about how other people might portray their own security problems, and their own security defenses.

I made it to Niteroi and back safely—in fact, unbelievably, to an email from the guy whose apartment I’m saying in telling me that he felt Centro was safe but to avoid public buses in Niteroi because he’d been held up on one. That was the one part of the trip I didn’t think twice about. So there’s that.

And there’s this: I read with great interest this recent, quite negative story about Rio. It hasn’t jived with my own experiences. I do feel like Rio is a slightly difficult nut to crack, at least for a foreigner—the ATMs don’t always work for us; English isn’t widely spoken (though why should it be, I get it); there are problems with crime and infrastructure and I keep waiting for a manhole cover to explode in front of me. But at this point in the trip, those concerns seem, so far, not quite a match for its obvious physical beauty. And the friendly people! And all the juices! And everything else. Time will tell.

02.14.2013

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This is undoubtedly the most amazing headline of my life. If you have any interest in reading about what happened when I stopped wearing a bra, please see (NO PHOTOS) here.

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So, obviously, Valentine’s Day is Thursday. It’s nearly too late to buy anything, for anyone, online, so might as well, we figure, buy lots of cute stuff for us. (Is that so wrong?) By the way, an unbelievable number of those things (carefully, but not entirely successfully, arranged in the shape on a heart, we want to point out, costs $40 or under. That’s beside the $2700 earrings.)

Anyway: Please click here for the entire shebang.

So: With Valentine’s Day approaching, we’re pretty sure that people are thinking more about underwear (“lingerie”) than normal. We have been, in any case, and, as we mentioned in this post about the awesome Journelle, trying to go slightly outside our comfort zone (read: shopping somewhere other than Victoria’s Secret). What we have discovered (“cage panties”) has shocked and sometimes scared us, but has also shown enough new things—things we have never even heard of before—that we thought we would catalogue them from “nice to naughty,” with sexy grades provided (in most cases) by the male source we had closest to hand.

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To be honest, we spend most of our waking hours in Gap Body cotton, because…just because, really. The funny thing is that we can’t even find the ones that are as boring (read: one color) as the ones we like.
Sexy grade: Our source says A, because guys are weird, and because, really, there’s something very positive about being low-fuss, low-muss people.

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Isn’t this the thong that everyone has? These or the Hanky Panky ones? Cosabella Never Say Never Cutie thong, $20
Sexy grade: Our male source says these are too commonplace to be interesting, and we’ll take his word on it. C+.

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We recently saw a movie called Concussion (it’s great!) at Sundance, and people in the audience literally gasped when the heroine kneeled down, and you could see her wearing garters. Gasped! Do people not wear these enough anymore? These are Agent Provocateur lacy suspenders, $190
Sexy grade: A.

Damaris strip knickers

We are so, so glad we were able to find a picture of what these look like without someone wearing them, because that’s just too much for our prude ways. (Here’s a link to one—and it’s only $11.95!) Damaris’s Zanzibar lace strip knickers, $132
Sexy grade: Our male source says, “A++++.” We feel like they’d be hard to, like, actually wear, so we’re pushing this down to a B+. We maintain: Comfort counts in sexy grades!

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This looks a bit boring from the front, but the back actually snaps up. It’s a little try-hard/50 Shades of Grey weekend, if you ask us, but okay. Lascivious Cara briefs, about $100
Sexy grade: B.

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Something about these strike us as funny, and funny is so obviously not the key to sexy Valentine’s Day lingerie but maybe sort of is the key, too, if you follow us. Damaris fringed knickers, $
Sexy grade: A