It may be raining.

Work may be stressful.

I may have been rejected from The Missouri Review.

But my 38G bras came in the mail.

And they fit, dammit.

Hooray.

For me.

(Oh, and for the record: they're really nice colors. One's dark chocolate and the other is blue with these white flowers - which sounds ugly, but isn't, honestly.)

Tonight at work, I felt like crap. I'm cramping, I've had a headache for hours, and I'm trying to become less painkiller dependent so I'd put off taking medicine all day. By the time I reached the pottery studio, which was mercifully customer-free, I felt like I could easily take someone's head off.

Luckily, I was working with my two favorite co-workers, Shadi and Roman. We had a leisurely evening, since no customers came in at all, and just sort of dusted and did little tasks and hung out and talked.

Roman is a curious guy. He's about 19, from somewhere in eastern Europe, though he lived for many years in Australia. He's also tall and adorable and geeky and bespectacled and likes classic rock and is generally very sweet. We have a nice back-and-forth banter thing going on, and it's very nice working with him. I thought for about two seconds that I might have a teeny tiny crush, but a.) he's got a girlfriend and b.) I have weird issues with dating people younger than myself anyway, so I've just resolved that he is an awesome person that I must interact with as much as possible.

In any case, at some point during the evening, we had to unload a messy kiln. One of the pottery pieces from the summer camp that was being fired exploded in the kiln, sending shards of pottery all over the other pieces. As a result, perfectly innocuous figurines of mermaids were decked in shrapnel-sharp ceramic bits that posed a hazard to anyone who touched them. As I discovered when I sliced a deep cut in my pinky finger on a mermaid that looked like Ariel's hippy cousin, Sunshine Rainbow.

Pinching my bleeding finger, I ran to the back room and ran the cut under the tap. It looked like a paper cut but felt really, really deep, and when I twisted my finger so that the water hit the cut in such a way that it went under the slit of skin, it hurt so badly that without stopping to consider that there might be preschool aged children in the store (which, luckily, there weren't) I shouted "MotherFUCKER!" at the top of my lungs.

Roman, who was busy dremeling a piece, dropped the dremel and ran over.

"Are you okay?"

The pain was so bad that there was a tear poised on the tips of my eyelashes. "I... ahh... I cut... I... OWWWWWWWW!"

Roman suddenly because very calm. He went to the sink, washed his hands as thoroughly as a surgeon, dug through the first aid kit, and pulled out hydrogen peroxide and band aids. He took my hand and put it over the sink, pouring some peroxide into the cap.

"No, no, no, no, that'll sting..." I said, pulling away.

"It won't sting, I promise. It'll just sort of bubble." He poured the liquid over the cut. As promised, it didn't sting, merely fizzed and foamed in a slightly disturbing way. When that was done, he handed me a tissue.

"Hold it tightly around the wound. Lots of pressure."

I did so. He then took a band aid, unwrapped it from its packaging, and took my finger in his hand. In the most gentle way conceivable, he wrapped the band aid slowly around my finger, fidgeting with it to that it wrapped properly. He gnawed his lip as he did this, holding my hand inches from his face. When it was done, he was just sort of standing there, holding my pinky in his hand. I looked at him.

It was a such an odd moment - it wouldn't have been entirely out of place for him to kiss the injured finger, only because what had preceded it was so... so tender, y'know? Not sexual, just... intimate. It would have been somewhat normal coming from a friend or a family member, but we're coworkers. Friends, I guess, but mostly strangers. He looked at the finger and gave it a sort of gentle tap with his fingertip.

"All done," he said.

"Thanks."

Later, when we were getting ready to leave, he asked me if I had any band aids at home.

"No."

He ran to the back room and came back with two of them.

"One's medicated, one's not. They, ah, they're fabric band aids. They're the best, they stay on better than the other kind." He handed them to me.

I live for moments when people touch each other outside of normal, everyday actions. It's one thing for your hand to brush a cashier's as they give you your change, it's another to touch someone deliberately, with kindness and intention. And it's always awesome coming from people you know and love, but there's something comforting about it coming from someone who falls outside of that category. Trust, compassion, kindness - all bundled up and released with touch, with physical intimacy, even if it's just for a moment.

***

Okay, on a note entirely outside of the above thought, I had to buy girly unmentionables PADS AND TAMPONS at the grocery store tonight, and after ringing my cookies and crackers through, the cashier stared at the packages of sanitary products on the conveyor belt for a good thirty seconds. He looked down at them, up at me, down at them again, up at me again... as though he expected me to apologize and, I dunno, remove them from the belt or something. I just stared at him. After a bit he sort of grabbed onto the corner of the packaging and practically hurled them across the scanner thingy (I think they rang up, I can't even be sure) and into the bag.

Okay, seriously. They're packaged in plastic. They won't bite. Way to make me feel all crappy about my unhappy menstruating body, on top of, you know, the intense pain and other awful symptoms that are plaguing me. *bites off strangers' heads*

Dyed and Pierced This is a view of the front of my hair and my new nose stud. Follow it to its gallery to see pictures of the ear, pictures of the hair, and me just doing some Myspace camera-work in my pajamas.

I may

or may not

have gotten a conch hoop,

put a new post in my helix,

and had

my nose

pierced.






(If you guessed "may," you'd be correct.)

(I feel so much better now.)

So, when I was getting ready to come to New York / the beach, I tore my room apart looking for my bathing suit. It's a very nice suit that I got a few years ago - a one piece that covers everything thoroughly except for le breasts (which are tastefully hinted at), which is okay because I am not self-conscious about my chest 97% of the time. Even so, it's a very supportive suit, and I love it.

In any case, I couldn't find the suit. I have no idea what happened to it. But I called Rachel. She said it was no problem. When I got in to New York, we stopped at a K-Mart and went to the bathing suits.

The good news is that because it's September, the bathing suits are all on sale. The bad news is that the only suits that are left are bikinis.

If you know me at all, I'm sure you can guess what's coming.

I have never worn a two-piece suit in my life. At the age where it would have been okay (i.e. before Carmen Was Big) my mother did not believe in parading around little girls in skimpy bathing suits. By the time it was okay with her, it wasn't okay with me. I was self conscious and I stuck with my one piece suits.

So there I was, standing in the K-Mart in New York City, thoroughly disheveled from a five hour bus ride, staring at a rack where there was less material in an entire bathing suit than one of my bras.

Rachel asked me my size, and I told her, so we scoured the rack for tops and bottoms. We couldn't find any that matched, so I grabbed a size 16 Joe Boxer halter top with a blue background and a pattern of neon flowers, and a bottom that was green with a light green pattern on it. I was exhausted and hungry, so I forewent the traditional "trying on" ritual and bought the top and bottom.

Fast forward to this morning. The weather had been looking icky and it had seemed last night that there would be no beach today. Which made me sad, of course, but it also meant that I wouldn't have to wear the SUIT OF DOOM. I woke up and took a shower, and when I came out I noticed sun coming through the skylight and Rachel walking around in her bathing suit.

"Good news! We're going to the beach!"

So I walked - very slowly - over to my bag and dug out the K-Mart bag. After Rachel and I spent about 20 minutes prying the security tag off the top with a hammer (which the salesperson had forgotten to remove) I walked into the bathroom and tried on the suit.

"Oh my God."
"Carmen, come out, I want to see it!"
"Oh. My. God."
"Come out!"

So I did.

The bathing suit bottom isn't so bad. I mean, it's like a pair of underwear that happens to be waterproof. No biggie. It fits fine.

But the top.

Oh God.

Sweet Jesus.

If I had a digital camera, I'd take a picture. But I don't, so I'm going to vainly attempt to describe to what this top looks like on me.

Imagine two cantaloupes, roughly the size of a pair of DD breasts. Imagine them flesh colored and with the same consistency as a pair of non-surgically altered breasts huge, DD breasts. Mine, naturally.

Now, hold up a CD. Imagine that the CD is a swath of material. Now imagine one CD covering the left cantaloupe breast, and another one covering the other.

Yeah.

Yeah.

To say that I'm hanging out is like of like saying that that Grand Canyon is a small hole in the ground. To say that I need about 98324721841 times more support is the understatement of the century. I feel - and look - like I need the cables of the Brooklyn bridge to hold me in, and all I've got is a spool of thread.

It is going to be an interesting day at the beach.

Fuckin' cantaloupes.