>The first difference I found between the US and the RD (Repulica Dominicana) was the bathroom situation. Even in the nicest neighborhoods in Santo Domingo, it is not possible to flush toilet paper down the toilet because the city’s septic systems can’t handle it. You have to throw the used toilet paper in the trash. All households and public bathrooms in restaurants, shops, etc. keep a little trashcan next to the toilet for this purpose.

Second, my husband and I learned that most neighborhoods don’t have running water 24 hours a day, no matter where you live. When we arrived at J.’s apartment, she told us that they don’t have running water between 11 pm – 6 am. If you need to use el baño during those hours, J. keep a ginormous garbage can in her shower that was full of water. You’d have to scoop out water from there to flush the toilet (or take a shower).

These bathroom challenges looked like peanuts, however, compared to the outhouses that dotted the countryside. On Monday, Dec. 26, we embarked upon a road trip to rival all road trips, and we set off for the Southwestern part of the RD. Our goal was to get to Lago Enriquillo, noted for being a huge saltwater inland sea with an exotic island in the middle of the lake with crocodiles, unusual iguanas, flamingos, and rarely, a creature that only exists on the island of Hipaniola is almost extinct, called a solenodon.

By the time we pulled into the park, I had to pee worse than I’ve ever had to pee in my entire life. I got out of the car and every step I took, my bladder screamed like a mad motherfucker. J.’s novio (boyfriend) asked the ranger where the bathroom was and he led me down a path. J., her novio, and mi esposo (my husband) stayed behind to pay the park entrance fee and arrange for a tour of the island. The deeper I went into the park, the more concerned I grew about ever seeing mis amigos again. I mean, who builds a bathroom that far away from the ranger station? On the other hand, I didn’t care if this guy led me into the forest and sacrificed me to the iguanas as long as I could pee first.

Finally we got the outhouse. There were two “stalls,” each with two toilets (!) and a urinal in them, side by side. Did I mention that I’ve never had to pee that badly in my life? Seriously, it was bad. If not, I don’t think I ever could go in a bathroom that looked like this: Let me note that the flash on my camera added tons of light to the picture, because in reality, this outhouse was fucking dark. In fact, when I shut the door it was pitch black. I actually had to re-open the door quickly right tbefore I went so I could locate one of the two toilets to pee in. (I guess that you can use the outhouse with someone else and not worry about seeing the other person do his business since it is so dark, but that still freaks me out.) Then when I closed it, I just hoped for the best – that I was in fact squatting over a toilet and not peeing on the floor and my own shoes. Also, I hoped not to pass out while I held my breath because the stench was beyond overwhelming. It was also wretchedly hot. Thank god my mysterious digestive illness did not decide that now would be the time to whip up a special shit treat because I think I would rather have shit myself.

I thought that I had incredibly huge cojones for peeing in that outhouse. I was wrong. I didn’t know what incredibly huge cojones (or possible insanity) was until mi esposo, J., and her novio came wandering down the path to find me and also decided to use the outhouse. Both J. and mi esposo had to take dumps. I warned them it would be nasty. J. walked into an outhouse and right back out again. J. is hard core, having done the Peace Corps in an indigenous village with no plumbing at all and doing a lot of work in extremely poor areas of the RD, but she said that her desire to shit left her the second she saw what was in the toilet and then accidentally breathed. (Her desire to crap, in fact, evaporated for the next 18 hours it was so bad.) Mi esposo – a man who works in finance and stays in five star hotels when he travels to Europe for business – went into the outhouse and didn’t come back out. I started to get worried. What if he passed out in there? Every few minutes I called out to him to make sure he was OK. After what seemed like an eternity, he emerged from the shitbox, drenched in sweat (as there was absolutely no airflow and it was like 100 degrees in the outhouse) and triumphant. J. commented that as seasoned veteran of outhouse crapping, she was super impressed by his endurance. Mi esposo commented that he was glad that he had been lifting weights at the gym to build up his quads, as it made it much easier to squat for his entire shit session.

I learned two important lessons that day: the first was to be grateful that I will most likely never need to use a toilet under these conditions again; the second is how truly and utterly amazing mi esposo is. His ability to adapt and make the best of any situation – no matter how shitty (ha ha) – is a wonderful trait.

Ultimately, I ask: would you bring yourself to pee or shit in a situation like this? If not, perhaps a good new year’s goal would be to train more in the event that you find yourself in such a situation. Either way, have a happy New Year!

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>Shocking, I know. My friend send me a clip of an ABC New Story about a mother who bought her kid some Bratz Dolls for Christmas. When her daughter looked under tthe doll’s mini skirt, she was horrified to find that the doll had on a thong. The kid had the good sense to think that was nasty, though. Good for her, especially with all those reports that girls as young as nine wear thongs and g-strings. (Although who knows whether this is a real trend or one of those media scare pieces?)

Here’s a question that occured to me as soon as I saw the piece was about Bratz: Why the fuck would anyone be surprised that the dolls wear thongs? Everything else they wear is inappropriately sexy, especially Bratz Babyz (my emphasis)? If you are giving your kid a hooker baby doll to play with, should you really be worried about protecting her innocence? Barbie’s got nothing on these demented dolls. Yeesh.

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>I returned to New York late last night from my fabulous adventures in Republica Dominicana, which I will recount in great and gory detail over the next few days. One of the first things that I needed to do upon my return, however, was laundry. Almost every place I stayed in had ants, and I actually put some of my clothes in quarantine for fear that I may have picked up some unexpected souvenirs during my escapades in the countryside, if you get my drift.

As long as I was going to wash any clothes that came down with me and my husband to the DR (or RD in español), I figured I might as well finish off all the clothes that were sitting in the hamper from before we left. This pile included the Cosabella red thong with the rhinestone B that the Giant Stuffed Penis so elegantly modeled last week. I gathered all the laundry up and began the annoying process of taking things down to the building’s basement laundry room, which for reasons of extremely poor architectural design, is only accessible through the elevator. There are no stairs.

A few hours later, I was relieved to be brining up the last load from the dryer. I was holding my laundry basket and speaking with one of the building’s staff about our time in the DR when another resident got off the elevator. She was holding a pair of tiny red underwear between her fingers as if she were holding a mouse by the tail. “I found this in the elevator,” she told the building staff member with disgust. “Someone must have dropped them.”

I could not have been more mortified. “Uh, those are mine,” I declared meekly. I grabbed them quickly, my face about as red as the underwear themselves. If you are going to lose underwear in the elevator of your building, it’s better if you lose a granny pair or anything less risqué than a Cosabella thong with a rhinestone B. Shit, I’ve got to be more careful with this kind of stuff. Not only was I horrified by the thought that people now think that I actually wear these types of things, but now I have to wash them again. And, now that I think about it, I think I was not supposed to dry them. Ooops.

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>This evening my husband and I are headed off to visit my friend J. in the Dominican Republic. J. is my oldest friend; we’ve been friends since her family moved onto my block on April Fool’s Day when I was in 4th grade. J. doesn’t subscribe to the school of self-censorship, which leads to much hilarity. Once we were having dinner at a restaurant with my husband and my friend Steph. Steph, my husband, and I all got our dishes, and J. was waiting for hers for about 30 seconds before she exasperatedly burst out, “What are they doing – jizzing on it?!?!” At that exact moment, the waiter appeared with her pasta. Fortunately, he didn’t speak much English, andd thinking she was asking for something else, he whipped out the parmesean cheese grater adn asked her if she wanted cheese. Steph, Husband, and I shouted, “Yes! She loves cheese.”

Anyway, that’s why J. is lovable and we’ll have a great time touring the DR. I doubt I’ll have internet access for most of the trip, but I’ll be back in full force with absurd, amusing, insane, and annoying rants and more pictures! The new year will bring the thong experiment as well.

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>I hate beauty products. A lot. I wear no makeup. My feeling is that this is what I look like, so why pretend it isn’t? Why on earth would I get up early, sacrificing precious minutes of sleep, to smear crap on my face so that I look like something that I do not actually look like? Plus, makeup is expensive. If I don’t buy it, I can waste my hard earned dollars on other useless products, or save it for retirement. I’d rather look semi-fugly in my youth/middle age than be forced to eat cat food in my old age.

Speaking of old age, I am pretty sure that I will be a wrinkled old hag (as opposed to the smooth faced old hag I am now) when I am older. This is because I never, ever use moisturizer, unless my face is so dry that portions of it are cracking off, which has happened. You know what? Old people have wrinkles. Deal with it. I will be proud of my wrinkles, as I am sure that I will have earned every single one of them, especially frown lines. (OK, laugh lines, too.) Moisturizer that doesn’t gum up my pores and cause acne is too expensive. Why waste it on daily use unless I have to?

Here is another horrifying confession: I shun tans. I like being pale. My people are from cold areas. We are very white so that we can soak up every ounce of Vitamin D and not get rickets. It serves a purpose. Tans are like makeup for the entire body. I’ve gone on vacations to warm places and when I got back, people weren’t convinced that I actually went where I said I was going. I’m sure I’ll be as ghostly pale upon my return from the DR next week as I am today. (Part of my shunning of the sun will result in me having less wrinkles when I am older, but so goes it. Hopefully it will also result in me not getting skin cancer as well.)

Part of the pressure to look perfect comes from an increasingly unreal standard set by the media and beauty industry. Thanks to photo retouching on magazines, ads, etc., I always feel like I am some super fat fuck. The truth is that I am just a regular average person, and in fact, don’t look that much worse than models before they were touched up. My friend forwarded me a link to a campaign sponsored by the Swedish government to combat increasing rates of plastic surgery in their country, which they understood was partly due to ludicrous beauty standards that no real person can achieve. The http://demo.fb.se/e/girlpower/retouch/ allows you to deconstruct a magazine cover and undo the touch ups. Look, the model is very pretty before the touch up, there’s no doubt about it. It’s amazing how much retouching they do, though. They don’t show how armpits and legs are airbrushed so that no stubble shows, but it’s still great.

Be a CUSSie and resist the power, whether it be the pressure to be artificially hairless and smooth, have a ginormous bust, or perfect white teeth!

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>Have you ever looked at the care instructions for undergarments? It’s all these little symbols that mean nothing to me. I spent all this money on a good bra recently and then realized I had no idea what I was supposed to do to clean it.

The arrival of my Cosabella Talco thong was an unexpected breakthrough. I looked at the label to see how to care for it, and much to my surprise, it had explanations next to each symbol. So if it winds up being good for nothing else, I can definitely get good use out of it by using the label to figure out how to clean my other lingerie.

This is the label on my Calvin Klein g-string. (Sorry it is blurry.) Even if it were not a blurry picture, what the fuck does it say? Using the Cosabella Talco Rosetta Underwear, I now know (from top row, left)
1. to wash in hot water (the little picture shows a trapezoid with water and a 30C in it);
2. not sure what a triangle with diagonal stripes means;
3. tumble dry (a square with a circle in it with a dot in the circle);
4. no iron (an iron with an X through it); and
5. (I think) no dry clean (a circle with an X through it).

Other symbols from the Cosabella Rosetta Underwear:
- a trapezoid with water and a hand in it = hand wash
- a triangle with an X through it = no bleach
- an iron with a dot in it = cool iron
- a square with a circle in it with an X through both shapes = no tumble dry
- a circle with a P in it = dry clean advised (not Parve, to those of you who keep kosher)

I can’t believe I own underpants that are supposed to be dry cleaned. Nutty.

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>I am pleased to report that Operation Smooth Legs and Pits is successful. Interestly enough, I found that it is easier to shave my right leg and pit than my left leg and pit. I think it is because, as in politics, the right is more compliant. It’ll just sit there are let things happen. The left resists and thinks for itself. While this is annoying sometimes, at the same time it makes me proud. Go lefties!

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>One thing I will not miss about my gym when it is razed to make way for luxury condos and an even fancier gym (with a pool!) are the showers. For reasons that I cannot remotely understand, all the showers are stall with opaque glass doors. When someone goes in the shower, anyone walking by can see the showerer clearly. Do I want people seeing me wash my cooch? Does anyone? It seems that some people don’t mind. I guess those are the same women who wander around the locker room naked, style their hair naked, put body lotion on while completely naked, and sit in groups around chatting while naked. I just find it beyond creepy.

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>I called the Victoria’s Secret telephone ordering line today to inquire about the status of the $12.5 million Fantasy bra, featuring the world’s second largest diamond. A nice woman named Bonnie took my call. I told her I was wondering whether the Fantasy bra was still available for purchase or whether a rich old Texas oil magnate bought it for his young surgically enhanced wife/mistress yet. She hesitated for a moment before saying that she hadn’t heard that it was, but didn’t think so. I said that I suspected that might be the case, we both laughed, and wished each other a happy holiday.

I guess my husband hasn’t bought it for me yet. Ha ha.

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>What is Sexy? The answer to that question, posed in a Victoria’s Secret marketing campaign from this past fall, is clearly not the following underwear:

Man, this model is straining to make these briefs sexy. She’s trying so hard, she’s a little contorted. Of course, I own two pairs in this style. They might not be sexy, but they sure are comfortable.

Theo looks very nice in my pair of Victoria’s Secret briefs. I like that these make him feel relaxed enough to model them in a sitting pose. I’m pretty sure that I bought the briefs at one of the semi-annual clearance sales Victoria’s Secret always seems to be having. You can get some good deals there. However, even the best deal or cutest bear model cannot hide the basic hideousness of these undies. First, they are some weird lilac. Second, they have butterflies and flowers on them. They look like they were made for an overgrown second grader. Sometimes I don’t know what I am thinking when I buy things. I will say that they are very comfy to wear.

Even the Giant Stuffed Penis and his merkin look silly, but comfortable in these underwear. The other pair that I have in this style are the same green swirl pattern as the scary and disturbing string bikini ones that Theo modeled on Dec. 7. What is most interesting about these granny undies is that pubes from unshaved snatch still hang out, despite the slightly more substantial coverage. My friend Steph reviewed the picture and commented that she thought that the merkin didn’t, in fact, hang out enough to be accurate.

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