In the early days of dating on the apps, I was naive and didn’t understand the danger of giving someone my real phone number. I just thought it was the next logical step after 72 hours of casual chit-chat. Our situationship was finally becoming a real boy!

That is, until the morning I was sitting at the breakfast bar, eating eggs with my mother, and I received a text that made me convulse and involuntarily hurl my phone across the room.

Explain THAT one to the same nosy mother who read my diary as a teen.

The text read, “How do you like my new socks?” accompanied by a top-down photo. In sharp focus were the dainty feet of a guy whose name I don’t even remember because that’s how insignificant our dialogue had been up to that point, clad in turquoise baby socks—which is my term of endearment for no-show socks that come in pretty pastels. Smack in the middle-ground, slightly blurry, but no less apparent, was…duhn duhn duhn…

His penis.

Gentlemen, gentlemen, gentlemen…

Where do we begin?

Do we start with the pastel baby socks? How they just scream masculinity and sex appeal?

Or do we start with the fact that you have not yet graduated from nameless number in my phone and, still, you have the audacity to send me a nude selfie AT BREAKFAST TIME.

I’ll say this really loud for all the men in the back:

Nobody wants this.

I mean it. Nobody.

Not one single woman.

I’m not saying women don’t like sex, or aren’t turned on by the male form. My friends and I have been known to solicit a sexy photo from men we are in actual relationships with, especially if those relationships are long distance.

The operative word here being solicit. As in: ask for. As in, not be assaulted by, at inopportune times, without proper mental preparation.

The fact is, we don’t love you because of your dicks; we love you in spite of them. I’m sorry to be the bearer of this news, but penises are gross. Spongey, angry, often-purple flesh tubes?

Come on, this can’t come as a surprise.

Far worse, however, than the sticky, floppy appendages we grow to love because we love YOU, are disembodied penises, which are the preferred modus operandi of the dating-app terrorists, because protecting their identities is of utmost importance.

I get that this is hard to understand. In college, my two best guy friends got an apartment together, and one night when I was over, I discovered a magazine that was solely pictures of breasts. Not a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition that subtly hints at sex with its scantily clad sirens—or a Penthouse, that overtly hints at it by attaching those racy bits to women with parted lips and bedroom eyes.

No.

This was a flip book of boobs. No arms. No legs. No faces.

“This is sexy to you?” I asked them, genuinely mind-boggled.

And that was the moment that I realized that what men and women find appealing are very, very different things.

During my last attempt at online dating, I decided to tackle the problem head on. I included this line in my bio:

Allergic to unsolicited dick pics.

To which all men, everywhere, responded by sending me their dicks.

After immediately deleting the app and deciding I’m perfectly content to die alone, I couldn’t help but be genuinely confused. Was the goal to blatantly disrespect my boundaries? Were these guys simply raging against the machine? Or was it the more likely scenario, that nobody reads dating profiles anymore?

A follow up question: If this works approximately never, why are men still doing it?

Never have I ever met a woman who has said, “Oh, I don’t know, I loooove to spice up my week with random peen.”

Or “Don’t be such a prude, Jennie, I choose all my strange based on photos that represent reality as much as a Temu catalog.”

So naturally, I interviewed my male friends. The unanimous conclusion was that, by writing NO PENISES in my bio, I was telling men to please, for the love of all things seductive, send me their schlongs ASAP.

Ahhhh, the old “No Means Yes” defense.

I gently explained to these men, who, at this point, were hanging by a tenuous thread to the identity of “friend,” that unsolicited dick pics are the modern equivalent of flashers skulking around parking lots in trench coats. Funny how those dudes all seem to have gone the way of the dodo. It’s because now they can assault strangers’ eyeballs and nervous systems from the comfort of their own living rooms.

That seemed to get the point across.

Even if the penises themselves aren’t egregious—which, to be clear, THEY ARE—it’s what y’all do with them that makes this whole experience so harrowing.

Standing at attention with your overly long toenails in the background?

Resting on your work desk like a Yule log? Excuse me while I go order a sterilized dome to live in.

At half-mast? GOOD GOD, MAN, WHAT ARE YOU THINKING? Nothing says I’m good in bed like putting <a portion> of your worst foot forward 🤦🏻‍♀️

Even the good ones (okay yes, there was ONE good one, and it was a snap of the guy fully clothed, with the merest hint of a suggestion of what was going on underneath, super subtle, leaving everything to the imagination—you may have been a fuck boi cliche, Jonathan, but you DID understand the assignment—and does that even really count as a dick pic???), even THAT one and the other tens of solicited dick pics throughout history bring with them an immediate feeling of resignation and annoyance. A giant, earth-reverberating sigh from the female collective.

Because now, this man wants something in return.

We’ll just go ahead and pop that onto our towering To Do list of unpaid labor. Because while men might wake up alone, grab their phone and snap a quick snek selfie before starting their day, I guarantee that whatever we women do in response—which we are doing 100% begrudgingly, because ain’t nobody got time for this shit—will take three hours, a set decorator and multiple ring lights.

All of this is to say, in no uncertain terms, that we women, DO NOT want your dick pics. The next time the urge overcomes you, we’re gonna need you to think about baseball instead. Keeping you off that '“registry” is our little gift to you 😘

The same applies to the men we love—unless we explicitly ask for them—and, even then, the request comes with the caveat that there may be a waiting period before you receive something in kind. You might also never receive anything in kind because we are doing the laundry.

And if that dissuades you from sending a dick pic in the future… well, then my work here is done.

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The other day, I got swooped by some crows. I had a hat on, so I was not immediately aware that an attack was underway. It took three underwing gusts right into my ear before I figured out what was happening, and by then I was indignant.

Don’t you know that I’m a friendly?! I shook my fist at the sky like a geriatric cartoon. Animals are my spirit animal!

Well… except maybe for birds.

And for precisely this reason.

I walked to the end of the treelined path, where, ostensibly, their nest was at least 20 feet above my head, and turned to give them a stinkeye that hopefully said I AM TOTALLY NOT a threat, but I will not be bullied.

To which they responded by chasing me around the block.

The encounter reminded me of a story my mom always tells, about a group of scientists at UDub who trapped and banded crows for research while wearing Dick Cheney masks. In the months and years that followed, any time a researcher walked around campus in that mask, they’d immediately hear the caw of angry crows overhead—with whole groups of birds converging on them as soon as they stepped out of their office.

Soon, even crows who had never been tagged joined in. That’s right, the OG crows told their friends down at the pub, and now a murder of grudge-drunk stranger crows had shown up to campus with pitchforks.

Then, researchers wore the masks around fledgling crows, and even the youngsters screamed at the mask wearers, cementing their hatred before they ever left the nest. The study tracked this ancestral vendetta for years, and the moral of the story is:

Don’t fuck with crows.

Some witches work with the fey. And look, I understand the appeal—the fairy folk are an ancient force that can bring a feral, ungovernable power to your magick. But they are also famously easy to offend. We’re talking about entities that will hide your keys whenever you’re in a hurry for the rest of your stinkin’ life over one perceived slight.

Choosing to work with them feels like the same kind of stupid that hands over all of its sensitive data to an AI agent1—just… why do it? It’s also the same kind of stupid that fucks with crows.

Which is why, when I recently saw a group of them savagely shredding the vinyl roof of my neighbor’s vintage Lincoln Town-Car, I texted him, You appear to have a crow problem, rather than scaring them off myself.

Girl’s gotta have unperforated eyeballs to get along in life, ya know?

But just because I don’t fuck with them, I’m sorry to say, does NOT mean that they do not fuck with me.

Picture the scene: You’re biking along in Venice Beach on a perfect summer Sunday, tipsy off pints of grapefruit mimosas served over crushed ice, enjoying the breeze kissing your face when—WHAM!

You never see it coming…

Talons like razors sink into the flesh of your skull…

You scream and, by some miracle, manage not to fall off your bike in the middle of the street.

The crow—realizing that you are not, in fact, a rodent with a fire-engine red pelt, as rodents are wont to be—aborts the plan. Now he launches skyward using the full force of his leg muscles to further penetrate your gray matter, which leaks sadly from the holes in your skull as you limp your way home.

This was an accident, of course; it never should have happened. But don’t tell me that it wouldn’t give you a leeeeetle PTSD around beasts of the avian persuasion.

I was surprised to learn that crows are not raptors, AKA birds of prey, but songbirds—which is a fact that feels deeply wrong given their murderous leg muscles. In any case, it’s not just these, ahem, songbirds who have me in their cross-hairs.

I once lived with a dirty hippy.2 He had parakeets, which I assumed had tidy little birdcage homes of their own. That is until I opened the door to feed them one day while he was out of town and, from multiple directions at once, got pelted with tiny grenades of feathery angst. Again and again, these agents of chaos whizzed angrily by my head while I shrieked and covered my eyes, tripping over furniture in retreat.

I solved the problem by throwing a handful of birdseed into the room and slamming the door. No birds were harmed in the making of my—now solidly entrenched—neurosis, but maybe some ought to have been.

Bastards.

Kinda like the hummingbirds that come to my feeder. Each takes a turn claiming it as sovereign territory and defending it with the energy of a medieval warlord. No other hummingbird may eat there, ever, under any circumstances, regardless of available space or nectar levels. And not once have they asked nicely when the feeder runs dry; instead, they come directly to the window and give me what for. If they had fingers, I have no doubt they would be wagging one right in my face.

My cat, for her part, has been dressed down by a hummingbird on more than one occasion. Each time, I silently beg her to slap that glittery schoolmarm, ballsy enough to hover mere inches from her, straight into orbit—and each time she responds with a contrition I can only take to mean the bird brought up my cat's deadbeat dad again, who left her mom and siblings behind the Dairy Queen dumpster before absconding with an Abyssinian—a topic which, quite frankly, is just rude to mention.

Then there was Bella.

Bella was a cockatoo who lived in a house I shared with five other people, which meant that most of the time, she was distracted from her shenanigans by our human antics, or it was noisy, or I was drunk. But every so often, I would find myself home alone, settled into the particular peace of an empty house, and she would unleash a shriek so sudden and bloodcurdling that my entire cardiovascular system would freeze over.

It wasn’t a bird sound. It wasn’t even an animal sound, not really. It was the sound of someone meeting their blood-spattered end in a Saw sequel. My nervous system never adapted. I would stand there, hand to pounding chest, staring at that smug little menace on her perch, and she would look back at me with the flat affect of someone who knows exactly what she did.

So, having been dive-bombed by crows, terrorized by parakeets, reprimanded by hummingbirds, and nearly sent to my maker by a cockatoo with a flair for drama, I feel I have earned the right to say the following with my whole chest:

Birds can fuck off.

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I’m in Austin this week—home of extremely bold grackles, a bloody mary so full of meat I once ate (drank?) it for dinner, and allegedly music.

Here, the weather app will gaslight you: “Zero percent chance of rain today,” it says confidently, while you are actively being pelted with rain.

Barbecue is on the agenda, as are 73 kinds of queso and a paneer tikka masala taco situation that I have high hopes will help me achieve nirvana. As I ping-pong from one food-related excursion to another—with hikes and moseying neighborhood walks in between—it occurs to me that some people don’t plan vacations around eating.

These are the same people who can’t say what their final meal on death row would be before they’re dragged off to the electric chair.

(A Quattro Stagioni pizza from Naples: artichoke hearts, mushrooms—Italian pizzerias use canned—olives and ham, all drizzled liberally with freshly pressed olive oil cradling tiny slices of Calabrian chile so spicy it makes your lips tingle.)

When I ask the death row question, and someone replies, “You know? I’ve never given it any thought,” my curiosity about them fades instantly, and the truth lands with a disappointing thunk.

You eat to live.

I live to eat.

On the other hand, when someone has an answer at the ready, or only has to ponder it for a second or two before their eyes glaze over with the memory of a meal so indelible it will reside in the folds of their cranial tissues even as they decay into dust, I lean in, knowing I’ve found a kindred.

I first realized the power of food to imprint on me at the age of 11, when my mom and I visited a restaurant in Queenstown, NZ. The meal was extraordinary in its simplicity, and for a kid being raised by a single, working mother who traveled for a living, scratch-made tomato soup was a novelty. Dessert was the highlight, however—a pavlova embroidered with chunks of fresh strawberries and chocolate—which I declared the most delicious styrofoam I had ever eaten.

When our layover on the way home stopped in the same town, I begged Mom to go back to the restaurant. She obliged, and a little foodie was born.

It's no wonder, then, that I ate my way through Italy in my 30s, where I learned two things: don't try the Mexican food—ever—and don't order anything that makes your server visibly upset.

If you order the special appetizer, and the server starts violently gesticulating toward his face—and also, inexplicably, the floor—and loudly repeating the word “piedi” over and over, and you shyly nod that yes, you still want the thing, and no, you won’t be dissuaded by this server’s clearly rising blood pressure, then you completely deserve what happens next.

The dish was a small plate of what looked like standard antipasti—red and yellow peperonata, slow-cooked to a silky sweetness and drizzled with vinegar; charred strips of eggplant with olive oil and fresh mint; mushrooms sautéed with garlic and parsley; braised whole artichokes, zucchini sporting hashtags of grill marks and the most succulent olives you will ever put to your lips.

There were also some thin strips of ordinary-looking meat that were impossibly tender. Eventually, I connected the server pointing at his face to the fact that these were beef cheeks. Not bad.

The remaining object on the plate looked like a giant albino cucumber, if big portions of the soft, seedy insides were missing. I assumed it was some innocuous local specialty—the Roman ghost cucumber, maybe—that I'd breathlessly report about on my return.

When I bit into it, it had the texture of an eraser, or a plastic milk carton, or—shudder—gristle.

Whether what came next was revulsion or recognition, I can't be sure—perhaps the body doesn't bother distinguishing between the two. I think I blacked out. All I know is that, as I faded into darkness, my brain finally connected the word “piedi” with its English translation: foot.

I was eating a cow’s hoof.

I realize I can only say that was my most haunting culinary experience because I never actually ate the bugs we served at Typhoon, one of two restaurants at the tiny Santa Monica airport that used more of its hangars for art studios than it did for actual planes.

Typhoon was the casual restaurant; upstairs was Hump, the fancy sushi spot that eventually got shut down for serving whale, which should tell you everything you need to know about what folks in these parts felt belonged on a menu.

The most popular insect dish at my restaurant was the stir-fried Taiwanese crickets, but we also served Manchurian ants (with frites!), scorpions on toast points, and…

Poultry-stuffed water bugs.

All the insects are raised in a sterile environment, so just bear that in mind while putting a cockroach LARGE ENOUGH TO STUFF WITH POULTRY into your mouth.

I didn’t last long at that restaurant, a fact at least 70% attributed to the chefs chasing me around every shift, waving water bugs in my face.

I want so badly to tell you that, by quitting, I escaped forced entomophagy,1 but that would not be true.

A few years later, my family and I enrolled in a cooking class taught by the infamous Paco Cardenas. Less than three seconds after Paco had introduced himself, my mom blurted out that I, too, was a cooking instructor back in the States, and everyone swiveled their heads to stare at me, which made me want to melt into the floor.

It’s true that it was my profession at the time, but I was not hired for my unmatched cooking prowess. Rather, the fledgling company was desperate to add more staff to its roster, and I knew how to bartend.

Unfortunately, this news led Paco to spend the next three hours teaching the class to only me. He led our group into every market stall in San Miguel’s town square, holding up produce for me to examine and touch and sniff. The other students could have been kidnapped in broad daylight by the cartel; Paco wouldn’t have noticed.

I imagine it made him nervous to have someone there who might know more than he did, although, given that what got me hired were my mojito-making skills, the chances of that were near zero. I was far more interested in fading into the background and letting the others get their money’s worth.

But Mom had done it: she’d inadvertently made him anxious while rendering everyone else in the class as irrelevant as white noise. While the others stood mutely by, Paco had me sip green juice and taste bites of dragon fruit and chayote. We admired artisan cheeses and tamales steamed in banana leaves. Then he produced a basket of fried crickets and held it directly in front of my face.

Onlookers stared. There was no graceful exit.

Horribly, I took one. It tasted like popcorn. Relief washed over my body. I had managed to keep my dignity intact and not be an embarrassment to my profession.

What I was not prepared for, however, was spending the remainder of the afternoon trying to dislodge a solitary cricket leg from the food trap between my back molars.

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Sundays are for going to the farmer’s market, except I’ve never been and can’t say for certain where it is. All I know is that when the forecast reads “surface of the sun,” the market must be held in a vast, air-conditioned space that happens to be empty for half of the year—at least in the mornings. Which is why neither of us questions it when we pull up outside an abandoned-looking movie theatre.

There’s only one spot left in the entire lot, so I claim it with the confidence of someone who once parallel-parked in a space 27% smaller than adequate by enlisting the help of some particularly brawny New York rats. (Poor fellows always get a bad rap).

Shoulders draped with reusable bags, Cindy and I emerge into eerie, apocalyptic silence. “Where is everybody?” I ask as we circle the building, looking for the entrance. Where are the dachshunds in strollers laden with lettuces and stone fruits? Where are the families sipping 10-dollar frozen kombuchas and carrying parcels of moist nuts? Why can’t we hear the local chanteuse murdering Fleetwood Mac on a Casio keyboard?

Instead, all we hear is a lone ceiling fan squeaking ominously with every sluggish turn, making no impact whatsoever on the torpid heat.

“That’s fucked up.” Cindy’s eyes flit to the fan before she resumes her earlier lamentation that her dog doesn’t like its new shoes. She wants to blame it on the pointed toes, but after spending a great deal of time with Penny, I know it’s that she can’t stomach the thought of wearing something colloquially referred to as “winkle pickers.”

“This could be very good for the witches,” I say, unable to shake the sense that everyone has been raptured. I tug on door after door, but they all remain stubbornly closed. Taped to one of them is a flyer advertising the very farmers’ market we are here to attend. We puzzle over this for a moment, then decide to try one last door.

The final door swings wide, welcoming us into a dingy theater that looks fully operational. Liquor bottles gleam under the lights, each labeled with a different day of the week. The concession stand is stocked with anthropomorphized hard-boiled eggs in varying stages of alarm and bread bags of hair, organized by color. In place of the popcorn maker is a claw machine arcade game. The tub is filled with plastic snow globes, each containing a tiny CVS pharmacy.

There is not a single human in sight.

“Hello?” Cindy calls.

Nothing, not even an echo. We exchange a look that says: What a weird farmers’ market. But curiosity has gotten the better of us.

Cindy heads down one of the carpeted halls, ducking into a theater showing the film “Moderate Peril.” Across the hall is a movie poster titled “Seven People Who Are Fine,” featuring images of people who do, indeed, appear to be fine.

As she continues to wander past empty theaters and down silent hallways, I find a heavy velvet curtain behind which I become increasingly convinced I will find the market. I pull it back and back and back, becoming more manic with each passing minute. It goes on forever, like passengers pouring out of a clown car or the endless colored scarves a magician pulls out of his throat.

I reach the end of the curtain at long last, just as Cindy reappears at my side. What we find there is a storage nook piled high with hand-painted rocking chairs, many of which look perfectly sized for leprechauns or beavers, if the latter were inclined to sit in a rocking chair.

But still, no farmers and no market. I sigh and head back toward the lobby.

“Should we make ourselves a drink?”

“We don’t drink,” Cindy reminds me.

“Right,” I say and then step behind the counter to pour myself a finger of clear liquor out of a bottle labeled “Thursday.” It tastes like escarole and brings on immediate existential angst. I leave it on the counter.

We linger a bit longer, waiting for something to happen. Nothing does, so we head back to the parking lot. On the way, we see a man lying on the ground next to a door marked Exit.

“He could be dead,” I say to Cindy. But he sits bolt upright, swiveling his head to pin us with a desolate gaze. Screaming, we sprint to the car, leap inside and careen onto the street before either of us notices the note under the windshield wiper.

Once we have driven a safe enough distance away, I pull over to grab the note. I hand it to Cindy and climb back behind the wheel. She unfolds it and reads: The market has moved to where it has always been. “Seems unhelpful,” she says before throwing the note out the window.

We drive in ever-expanding circles until we find a farmers’ market in a school auditorium several neighborhoods away. It has all the usual features: stroller dogs, savory dips in every color of the rainbow and people lined up to spend a month’s salary on a sourdough. While purchasing color-changing tea that promises to rid the drinker of excessive sweating, I tell the vendor we had trouble finding the place, but that we did find an abandoned movie theatre well-stocked with bags of hair.

“Oh,” she says pleasantly, handing me my change. “You found the Someday market. Most people never find that one.”

I open my mouth to ask a follow-up question, but she's already helping the next customer.

On the drive home, Cindy asks, “Should we go back? Maybe that guy needed help.”

“Absolutely not,” I say, because I’ve always thought it ill-advised to run toward the zombies. But my conscience gets the better of me, and I make a lurching left turn to head back the way we came. Only, when we arrive, all we see is an empty dirt lot.

“A month from now, I’ll be convinced that I dreamt this,” I say, consulting my map for the third time.

“That’s why I got you this,” Cindy says, pulling a snow globe containing a tiny CVS out of her bag and placing it on my dashboard.

Originally published on JennieOConnor.com.

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It is an unhospitable hour, one that begs the question of your better judgment. You find yourself standing alone inside a medieval library—a cathedral of shadow and story. Gothic archways line the walls like sentinels, concealing leather-scented alcoves and the trailing tendrils of whispers. Stone tracery on the windows glistens in the candlelight, making intricate patterns that split the glass into jewels. The ribbed vaults evoke the golden laces of gladiator sandals, a trend your body remembers with a shudder.

“Hello?”

You say it like a question. Your voice echoes. Nothing stirs.

Faintly, in the distance, a phone is ringing. The ringing goes on and on, and even though it’s faint, it turns your anxiety up to eleven.

“Hello?” you say again, louder this time. Surely someone hears the phone, someone whose job it is to answer phones. That person is decidedly not you; you hate phones.

You remember your first phone in High School, the one with the cord you stretched beyond its physical limits because sometimes you needed to move around during a marathon call, back when everything of import in your life was mainlined in gossip and Slurpees. When life hadn’t started demanding sacrifices from you yet—your time, your peace of mind and the imperative to tolerate bullshit among the most painful.

Now you can’t stand phones. In idea or in practice. You see an unscheduled phone call as a crime against humanity.

“Do you think I’m an animal?” you want to demand of the caller. “Lolling about, twiddling my thumbs, waiting for you to call? The kind of person with a completely empty calendar and a life devoid of meaning, unless people like you fill it up with arbitrary mid-day phone calls? Calls that might last 40 seconds or—quelle horreur!— two hours? And somehow you think this is a respectable way for humans to conduct themselves?”

That’s why you refuse.

You’re not going to answer that phone, even though the rings are louder now and starting to sound shrill as a toddler’s shriek. Your right eye has begun to twitch, but you don’t answer because it might be him. The one who ingratiates himself with talk about nothing and “remember whens,” and then shapeshifts into melancholy with the stealth of a fox. The one who scents your desire to wrap things up and digs his claws in deeper. And then it’s three hours later, and you’re trapped in the polite purgatory of the unscheduled phone call, effervescing with self-loathing about not having boundaries.

Or maybe it will be the other one. The paranoid one, who wants options but not these options. The one who’s fluent in both helplessness and how to work the system, and is so relieved to have you as a sounding board because you understand him. You murmur “Mmhmm” and “Okay” at the conspiracy theories, and you feel as if you are pouring the sweet nectar of your soul into a vast empty vessel that is impossible to fill.

“Somebody, please!” you cry out to no one in particular, as you break into a run, trying to put space between you and the ringing phone before the bulging vein in your temple explodes. Suddenly, your phone dings. You pull up short and fish around in your bag, turning it face-up to reveal a text.

Your breath catches. Every tiny hair stands at attention. Your blood feels as if it’s freezing in your veins, like an unrelenting cold front sweeping across the landscape of your organs.

This can’t be. This is the worst-case scenario.

Your heart is hammering like it’s trying to escape your chest. Your fingers tighten around the phone. The words on the screen burn like a curse:

Call me.

Panic rises in your chest, threatening your ability to suck in air, which you suddenly seem to require in increasing amounts. You must ignore this insane request and the cascade of questions it raises:

About what? Do I need to prep? Is it important? Like, life-and-death important? Could this call actually just be a text?

The swirl of your thoughts and the maddening racket are building to an operatic crescendo. You hurl your phone back into your bag and run, pumping your legs like an Olympian, leaving clouds of dust motes in your wake. The library looms in front of you, seeming to grow in length the closer you get to the exit. Over the cacophony, you hear your cell phone start to ring. At first, you try to ignore it, but it’s perfectly interspersed with the ring of the library’s landline, so that now there is no pause between rings. The sound is simply one long note stretched into a tinny, keening alarm.

“No, no, NO!” you shout, stopping once again to extract the phone from your bag. As you withdraw it, you see the call going to voicemail. You wait for the summary message to show on your screen. 10 seconds... thirty... one minute... before you realize with a wave of revulsion that... they didn’t leave a message.

You stare at the blank screen and feel your face pull into something feral. They didn’t leave a message! They just called and hung up. And now they wait, like a hungry vampire, for you to call them back.

Your phone begins to ring again.

You let out a strangled scream and hurl it into the nearest chair, where it continues to trill like a tired old music box, drooping and distorting, curdling the lullaby into something rotten. The sound vibrates the marrow of your bones. You clamp your hands over your ears, but the ring is inside you now, reverberating in your jaw, your teeth, your blood.

And then...

A knock.

Clipped. Deliberate. Real.

You freeze, doubting your ears amidst the din.

Another knock.

You run toward it, heels drumming the stone in a desperate rhythm, lungs full of fire and hope. Someone is here. Someone is finally here. They’ve come to put an end to this madness.

You reach the door and grasp for the handle just as the voice purrs through the keyhole, saccharine and uninvited:

“Darling...

I was in the neighborhood...

Just thought I’d drop in and see what you were up to.”

Originally published on JennieOConnor.com.

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I often say I don’t like people, which is not true at all. I love people—just certain ones whom I see at specific times of my choosing.

It’s not so much “not liking” the rest as it is a persistent, low-grade disappointment over how people ruin everything. The best example I can offer: in 2019, during a government shutdown-induced staffing shortage, visitors to Joshua Tree National Park decided to “create new roads” for off-roading and cut down a handful of trees that may have been older than our country. NBD.

In my dreams, I’m roaring at them:

IT’S A NATIONAL PARK, FOR CHRISSAKES! Why not just go take a piss on Stonehenge? Who hurt you? I guarantee it wasn’t a fucking Joshua Tree.

These folks have earned a spot on the list I keep for the day I become an evil billionaire with the means to shoot people into space.

Subscribe if you, too, love people but wish they came with an off switch.

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Somehow, despite being the author of a list like this, quality time with others is my love language. Which sorta sounds like the opposite of being an introvert, if you define introvert as “a person who does not like people.” Which, incidentally, is not how Merriam-Webster defines it.1

And while Merriam-Webster is entitled to their opinion, I will continue to believe that mainlining quality time flies in the face of introversion—based entirely on my own admittedly extreme definition, which doesn’t even accurately apply to me.

I enjoy making memories. Bonding and laughing while imbibing intoxicants. Locking eyes across a table. Nodding along to stories I’ve heard a hundred times, then chiming in during the retelling. (See, I love people! Not an introvert.) I love these things so much that it’s perfectly reasonable, I think, for someone who chooses to be on their phone during this sacred communion to become the target of my unmitigated fury. (Oh, wait.)

In these moments, I disassociate. My mind stages an unhinged private opera wherein I emit a scream so piercing it’s pure sonic shrapnel. Mirrors and windows shatter. Dogs three neighborhoods over cover their ears. In the silence that follows, the perpetrator blinks bewilderingly, surrounded by glittering evidence of my desire to just catch up a bit, ya know?

In another version, I wordlessly pluck the phone from their hand and violently beat it to death. It is deeply, cathartically satisfying.

But the truth is, even though I like some people enough to entertain violent fantasies about destroying the things that get in the way of our hang time, I just don’t think I’m cut out for peopling. My body outright rejects it.

I first noticed this phenomenon back in High School. My face was a normally functioning face until the moment I arrived at school. The instant I saw a single person—even someone far away whom I didn’t know, making it a near-zero likelihood that we would have to interact in any way—my facial orifices would go into hyperdrive. My eyes would water like I was trapped in a sandstorm. My nose would run like an Ebola monkey’s. I would enter class, mopping my face with a ShamWow to avoid the dreaded raccoon eyes and just generally presenting as the human equivalent of a snail trail.

I told myself this happened because school started early, and it was brisk at that hour, which sometimes results in a purging of the facial orifices. But I grew up in Southern California, where it’s never really all that brisk, and the timing of the appearance of other people seemed far from coincidental.

Then in 2020, I started a podcast. Almost immediately, I became stricken with a chronically runny nose that would start at the beginning of an episode and utterly evaporate once it ended. I spoke to my doctor about it, and she told me that it was rhinitis and that, on a scale of one to real problems, this was a -10.

So I took matters into my own hands. I replaced my home’s air filter, which, it turns out, you should do every 3 to 6 months, rather than never because what’s an air filter?

I bought an air purifier, which is the simplest and fastest way to improve your health, said the guy on the podcast who sells thousand-dollar air purifiers, but if you act now, you can get one for the low, low price of $800. And if you're wondering how I found my way to that particular podcast, the subject line of the email announcing it read: "Do you have a chronically runny nose?" To which I responded, “Here, take all my money.”

And still, whenever I meet someone live on Zoom, I end up wriggling my nose like a coked-up Samantha from Bewitched, in an effort not to wipe it with my fingers like a plebe.2 I have occasionally brought Kleenex to video interviews, though nothing says I’m really leaning into my crone years like a woman dabbing her nose on camera with a tissue. My mother-in-law keeps Kleenex in her bra, and this is not a rite of passage I’m ready to embrace.

For a time, before every interview, I would wad up little plugs of tissue and put one inside each nostril to staunch the flow. It worked remarkably well until it didn’t, and I had to write to my video editor and ask him to deal with it, “it” being a monstrous white booger that I’m sure he found very perplexing.

So, I think it’s fair to say that a leaking face is not exactly conducive to being around people, and that's why we can’t hang out this weekend.

Or ever.

Originally published on JennieOConnor.com.

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It’s free, I don’t spam and you’ll always get my work straight from the source.

My new vet talks like a muppet.

Also, his breath is terrible, and he’ll tell you from across the waiting room that your poor dog will never NOT need his anal glands expressed. Lovely.

That’s not what bothers me about him, though.

What bothers me is that he shushed me during the exam.

Not when he was listening to my cat’s lungs with his stethoscope. Nope. Just when he was squeezing her around the middle, presumably ensuring all her organs were in the right place. “Wait till I’m done with the exam,” he growled.

So I waited, feeling embarrassed and resentful like I did at 10 when my mom’s best friend scolded me for something, and every cell in my body wanted to scream, YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME!

And I waited. And waited.

I waited so long in that awkward silence for him to make notes that I thought surely he had forgotten I was speaking in the first place. The whole time, my body engaged in the strange, involuntary act of shrinking and kind of holding my breath so as to minimize distractions. At long last, he turned to me with an expression worn only by old white men who have asserted their dominance in a way that feels like muscle memory and sniffed.

“Yes?”

A few minutes later, trying to verify I was giving her the right amount of medication, I asked if the syringe I had was 1 mL, and he belly laughed at me. He began mansplaining something that I couldn’t hear through the dripping disdain, but luckily, the nurse cut him off and assured me that, yes, indeed, it was 1 mL. So, I was correct. Ahem.

In the minute after that, he stood up and started backing out the door, even as I desperately fired off the questions I’ve been accruing on a list for three years. I had a total of five, and two remained unasked when he closed the door in my face.

Oh, and one of his replies was a non-answer that raised two more questions. Walk in with five questions; walk out with four.

That’ll be $340.

I told my best friend about the vet visit, and she was incensed.

“You’re gonna complain, right? You HAVE to say something!”

“No,” I sighed. “I’m just gonna find a new vet.”

I almost said, If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

I don’t recognize this voice in my head. It doesn’t come from my family, who, under the right circumstances, has plenty of unkind things to say. Nonetheless, it is deeply, deeply ingrained. I won’t write a negative Yelp review unless I think a business should be shuttered. That’s rare.

But what about all the subpar experiences I’ve had? Why have I decided it’s best for everyone if I just let them go?

I think of the AirBnb that smelled overwhelmingly of fried fish and demanded, via a handwritten sign, that guests take off their shoes before walking up a set of black stairs. Once upon a time, the carpet on those stairs had been white. You might as well have asked me to go barefoot into a Port-a-Potty.

Or the dentist whose treatment was so aggressive my face was bruised for two weeks. It looked so gnarly that when I took my boyfriend to the restaurant I worked at for lunch, a coworker took one look at me and lunged at him. Ah, chivalry.

That dentist later told me I had to have the same procedure done on the other side, and I cried. She blinked at me, seemingly bemused about the liquid coming from my eyes, and explained that this was not a major procedure. As if to say that for that reason, my very real anxieties about it weren’t justified.

I found another dentist after that, thank the Goddess.

But it took that.

Le sigh.

I read this quote in a recent Liz Gilbert post, and it stopped me cold.

I consider myself a freedom seeker. I’ve left social media and am still fighting my way back from the toxic indoctrination of hustle culture. I’m learning to go slow in a world that admonishes speed. I aspire to be a digital nomad for six months a year.

I’m child-free and partner-free, and while I’m not knocking either, there’s an enviable amount of self-governance folded into that choice. I’ve given up alcohol after 30 years of being a professional drinker.

Freedom, baby. Give me all of it.

My quest for freedom is what makes being a witch so inviting. I want life to feel easy. I want to attract, not chase. I want my freedom to feel like power—the power to have, do and be whatever I want. Magick makes that possible.

And yet.

And yet, I am a people-pleaser.

I would rather “ingratiate myself” than be a bother. I’ll bring my own food to a dinner party before I’ll even so much as mention my gluten allergy. I’d rather a person I barely know be comfortable over me. And it’s not because I’m one of those selfless heroines who will give you the shirt off her back. Oh, I’ll give it to you, but I’ll resent the hell out of you—and myself—the entire time.

More than one friend knows me as the girl who won’t excuse herself to go pee because it’s rude to interrupt when someone’s talking. This is especially problematic when the speaker in question won’t shut up. If drinking is involved, that happens to be always.

I’ll take the ruptured bladder, thank you. It’s more polite.

Reading the quote, it suddenly became clear that these two sides of me cannot coexist. People-pleasing and freedom-seeking can not play on the same playground. The balls-to-the-wall, fearless, nomadic adventurer I see in my head is not the same woman who shrinks to make herself smaller, so her muppet vet won’t get irritable about ambient noise WHILE HE THINKS.

Once in a while, if we’re lucky, we get to be the unwitting victim of a cosmic ice bucket challenge, and I’ve gotta say, I’m here for it. Please oh please, slap me out of the decades-long trance that has led to me apologizing for existing in the name of being—what—liked by meaningless strangers? Rip that band-aid off. Snatch me from the house, then burn that fucker to the ground.

When I sat down with Liz’s post, I’d planned to read for hours, to gift myself a long, luxurious morning of my favorite indulgence. But the moment I read that quote, I aborted that plan in favor of a new mission:

To bury the people pleaser.

I wasted no time. It was a quiet ceremony, without fanfare. It turns out no one is actually going to miss that girl, so there was no one there to mourn.

And yes, it was a girl I buried. She may have had smile lines, but she was small and scared and full of shame about the things she let men do to her because she didn’t want to make a scene. Because, before “Me Too” and even sometimes afterward, speaking up could just as easily result in a whole different brand of shame. The shame of being doubted.1 The cognitive dissonance in the notion that a woman might be “asking for it.” The regrettable fact that laughing off vile comments from bar patrons was the only way to keep that job.

How many times did I sacrifice myself on the altar of being nice? Uncomplicated? Obedient?

What a cosmic joke to first experience all those grimy indignities only to be made whole a decade later by a vet with halitosis. I’m guessing it’s because I assumed that, by now, I’d gotten better at this thing called life and closer to my end goal of freedom. And when his flagrant infantilization showed me my self-belief was a house of cards, it was the final straw.

When I read Liz’s words, I knew that old me was finished. What I didn’t know was that among the ashes was a silently gestating spark of primal rage. Now that it finally had oxygen, the flames unfurled, and I met a dragon I had forgotten about—feral, unbridled and tearing out her hair. She had scared me once, and I’d banished her.

I’m not savage, I told myself.

It’s not polite.

I wasn’t the only one who found the dragon fearsome. I can still see the widening eyes of those who had the misfortune of meeting her, and feel how that gutted the girl I once was.

Their eyes said, in no uncertain terms, I’m afraid of you.

And for the first time, instead of feeling shameful and shrinking, I felt the dragon raise her head and say, “You should be.”

Unleashing a monster suits the witch in me just fine. She’s known all along that unhinged energy is raw power. She’s been biding her time, waiting for me to unlock the dragon’s cage. To find the kink in losing control.

The dragon, it turns out, is hungry.

Hungry to make up for lost time. Hungry to set the record straight. Hungry to get these motherfuckers in my complex to put out their green waste bins. Bring me your revolutions, darlings. No one and nothing is safe.

The way my life has transformed overnight is almost comical. To some, these achievements might appear meaningless. But the people-pleasers out there will know that these acts feel like insubordination. My muscle memory says it’s wrong, but the rush of not being afraid for the first time in my life to ask, “Do you want a piece of me?” is like a drug.

Useless meetings? I’ve unapologetically hacked these from my schedule.

Poorly phrased requests leading to dozens of annoying rewrites? I persuaded my client to write the document himself and, by some mindblowing miracle, he gave me credit.

The marketing team I work with was needlessly complicating my life, so I got them to add an extra step to their workflow just to make my job easier. Who even am I?

I finally got all my questions answered by the vet, too, even if it did require pretending I didn’t hate him. Now that I know the difference between diplomat and doormat, I can decide when it’s in my best interests to play nice.

I’m fighting for justice like never before, too. Maybe it’s the times we’re living in. Maybe I got cosmically ice-bucketed because the world needed another warrior. Because one thing is for certain, it’s a mistake thinking I’m not dangerous.

If you come for my friends, I’ll challenge you to a duel. If you’re running around hurting people, I’ll unleash the hellhounds. If you need a mama bear who can get scary on demand, give me a call. My palms are itchy, my lovelies. There’s powerful magick to be made.

And polite has left the building.

Originally published on JennieOConnor.com.

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A friend told me that cold plunging eliminated his chronic pain.

At the time, I had a coach who did daily cold plunges, but I thought it was a bro-ey elective suffering kinda thing, like the 70 Hard Challenge or pulling a tractor while attached to a body harness.

I’m intrigued by health and beauty trends, but not when they involve self-abuse. Fasting makes me homicidal. Facial peels can fuck off. Lasering my nether regions got nixed the moment they got to the butthole, a feeling I later described as being sodomized by Zeus’s lightning bolt.

But I have chronic pain, so I let my friend’s proclamation propel me down a rabbit hole about why ice baths are the new black. Right off the bat, I discovered I could freeze to death in the comfort of my own home for the low, low price of $39.99. (I ordered a more expensive tub, though, which was fun because it definitely didn’t spring a leak within seconds of existing outside of the box 🙄).

Why, you may ask, did I spend my hard-earned money on a torture device? Because, after listening to the most mild-meltingly cerebral podcast in human history, I learned some pretty cool stuff.1

For instance . . .

Cold plunges heal chronic pain by reducing inflammation.

Cold water strains your body, forcing it into “survival mode” as it works to maintain its core temperature. This increases blood flow circulation, delivering freshly oxygenated blood to areas of the body that need to recover, making it great after high-intensity exercise or endurance training.

I don’t do high-intensity exercise—it’s too intense—but if you enjoy punishing activities, you should definitely add cold plunging to your To-do list.

Ice baths also remove toxins and inflammatory markers from the body and decrease the production of cytokines, which are proteins that play a role in inflammation. Lastly, they improve the delivery of oxygen and nutrients throughout the body, leading to better overall health.

That was a lot, so let’s just bullet point the other benefits.

Cold plunges:

• increase the body’s metabolism, helping you lose weight

• can reduce stress and anxiety by increasing the production of mood regulators like norepinephrine, dopamine and serotonin

• can increase the release of endorphins, which are a natural painkiller and mood enhancer

• can make you feel alert and increase energy and focus

• can improve mental clarity by increasing blood flow to the brain, which, in turn, improves memory and concentration

Ice baths can even increase the production of new brain cells. Furthermore, by forcing yourself to embrace the stress of cold exposure as a challenge, you develop resilience and grit, allowing you to cope better and maintain a calm, clear mind when confronted with real-world stressors.

I’m living proof this works. I am now so chill I don’t even mind the 682 steps required for me to cold plunge three times a week.

The ideal temperature for a cold plunge is between 50 and 60 degrees F.

Cool. Cool cool. If you live in Colorado, like my friend does, you just keep your ice bath outside. Easy.

If you live in the desert, however, where it is sometimes 127 degrees F, this is not an option unless you decide you want your plunge to be used as a hot tub instead. Also, keeping your tub outside is a good choice if you want it to be instantly filled with dust (oh, yes, even covered—the sand dunes in the corner of my house laugh at you for even suggesting that would work).

So, desert living = indoor cold plunge. The master shower should suffice. Note: It will take 24 minutes to fill your bath with water. That entire time, you will fret about droughts and what a rotten steward of the planet you are.

The water will come out of the faucet at about 80 degrees because it’s the desert. So first, you will need to dump every reusable ice pack you own and the freezer bowl from your ice cream maker into the ice bath and leave them for at least one hour. The number of ice packs required will occupy an entire shelf in your custom-built, already not-quite-large-enough freezer.

Then, you will need to make ice.

To get the maximum benefit, the recommended time for cold exposure is 11 minutes per week.2

I could do that all at one time, but I’d have an aneurysm. So I do it in three sessions. The deal is, the colder the water, the shorter amount of time you need to expose yourself to it. In the winter, when the ambient temperature in my house is cooler, I can get what I need in three 4-minute sessions. In the summer, I have to stay in longer to get the same benefits because the water just doesn’t get as cold.

How cold does my water get?

Nine gallon-sized bags of ice worth. And two gallon-sized jars plus two quart-sized bottles of cold water’s worth. Buying ice every day would be instantly cost-prohibitive. And the biggest grocery store bag doesn’t come close to nine freezer bag’s worth in quantity. And the thought of running to the store every day makes me want to die. So I reserve the entire top shelf of my fridge for my plethora of water storage vessels and the rest of my not-quite-large-enough freezer for bags of ice. I may also have room for hashbrowns.

A minor problem is that my freezer doesn’t make ice. It’s not my freezer’s fault; it wants to. It’s just that the shelf that goes over the ice maker and keeps freezer scoobies from falling into it is aftermarket? was made by a blind person? exists solely to get on my last nerve? The tiny square hole through which you can access the ON/OFF switch for the ice maker is misaligned by a quarter of an inch, meaning that when the shelf is pushed in all the way, it depresses the switch to OFF. The ice maker will happily turn on and oblige my request to make ice unless the shelf is snapped in place. If I try to leave the shelf pulled out a little bit, the door won’t close. Shoving the door closed snaps the shelf back in place, and turns off the ice maker.

Of course, I could remove the shelf, but there is already limited real estate in my not-quite-large-enough freezer. And also, freezer scoobies 🤢.

So, I purchased a countertop ice maker. The little thing chugs along merrily at all hours of the day, needing emptying roughly every 35 minutes, which I forget to do 93% of the time. Therefore, it takes three days to make nine bags of ice. This is what my freezer looks like on the day of a scheduled cold plunge.

Doing it at home is easy!

I have come to really look forward to cold plunge days because, as a woman of a certain age, I have developed the superpower of spontaneous combustion. This superpower is useful for eradicating sleep (because who can sleep on the surface of the sun?) and rendering T-shirts unwearable in five minutes flat. Also, drinking coffee now makes perspiration shoot out of my armpits like a fire hose, so that’s fun.3

This is why, on cold plunge days, I do a little happy dance before canceling all my meetings and social plans to prepare the ice bath. If you’re interested in doing your own at-home cold exposure therapy, just follow these steps:

1. Fill the tub, depleting the planet of one small lake in the process.

2. At least one hour before the scheduled plunge, fill bath with reusable ice packs and ice cream maker parts.

3. Once ice packs have melted, grab a heavy-duty serving platter, drape it with a tea towel and pull all dripping and soggy packs out of the tub. Be sure to use well-loved ice packs, so they may or may not have holes and be leaking a toxic substance that isn’t water. This is the price you pay for health 🤷🏻‍♀️.

4. Transfer vessels of refrigerated water to ice bath (x2).

5. Transfer bags of ice from freezer to bathroom floor (x3). (By now you have gotten in your 10,000 steps for the day, so pause to congratulate yourself).

6. Bang bags around a lot to break up ice for easy removal. Note: Many will spill.

7. Open any remaining bags that haven’t already spilled their contents everywhere.

8. Strip.

9. Dump in ice.

10. Set timer.

11. Try not to die.

And repeat! Every three days, of course, because that’s how long it takes to re-up on ice.

Bear in mind that an ice bath stored indoors with no chlorine (ick, that stuff’s bad for you) will start to get slimy after approximately 24 hours, so you’ll get roughly three plunges for each small lake you deprive the world of before having to empty the tub, scrub the ever-loving shit out it, and start again.

I’ve told a few people about this new habit, and they’ve all looked at me like I was insane. But I don’t have kids, so I can spend all the time I would’ve spent driving them to soccer and playdates filling my ice plunge instead. Still, I asked my mom for a chilling mechanism for Christmas 🙏🏻.

I don’t have high hopes though, because, after one glance at how much a base model chiller goes for these days, she gave me a look that said I’ll get right on that.

Originally published on JennieOConnor.com.

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It takes talent to end up in the back of a police car by day three of a 90-day journey through Italy. But if you’re not “going big,” are you even living?

As is the case with many good stories, a bottle of wine was involved. Some folks think that sounds like a lot for one person. But to this veteran bartender pulling an Eat, Pray, Love after an apocalyptic break-up, a bottle of wine was breakfast.

Wine filled me with a detached daring that led me to proclaim, “Nothing matters!” and fly to a foreign country without a plan, a map or a working phone. To underscore my lack of fucks, I smuggled a quarter ounce of weed into my luggage. I had been wandering Rome in a haze since arriving, surviving off gelato and getting impossibly lost, which was a welcome distraction from feeling. 

On the third evening, I wandered into an osteria and ordered—you guessed it—a bottle of wine. Then, I promptly judged myself and added cod to the ticket, which arrived at the table with its head on. I decided I was much too fragile to dissect my dinner, so I poked at it impassively for a few minutes before pushing it aside. The truth was, food had lost its allure the same morning my vibrant life had become a faded no-color. Who could eat when their heart felt like roadkill?

It was wine that brought Frank and me together, in fact. From the moment he answered the roommate-wanted ad, our friendship was a fuzzy montage of days and nights spent verbally sparring over glasses of Sauvignon Blanc. It was a jammy Malbec that led us to tumble into bed together some months later, which, if you’re looking for a way to “go big” in the poor life choices department, is an excellent move.

Wine makes you delusional in many ways, not least of which is believing you are sashaying gracefully back to Termini Station when, in fact, you are a hot mess. You might even believe that because you managed to find the bus destined for the convent putting you up, you are slaying.

*Cue fireworks*

The bus was dark and warm except for where my forehead pressed against the window. Pajamas were imminent, and my body melted into the seat in anticipation of climbing into them. I felt pixelated, made of bees, and the bees turned off the part of my brain that knew the key to survival was paying attention. Instead, I popped in my earbuds and considered how “big” I’d gone in the breakup department.

Some people have uneventful and, dare I say, even amicable breakups. Others get dumped the morning of their 30th birthday while dressing for a wedding they’re supposed to attend with their (now) ex. Some breakups are due to bland reasons like “The timing isn’t right” or “It’s not you; it’s me.” Others are because the boyfriend falls for the married best friend, has an affair and gets caught via some nefarious snooping. Friends and family won’t actually say that you’re just as bad as they are for the nefarious snooping part, but you will feel their judgment. I decided someone should award a prize to people who manage to fail so spectacularly at love.

And that prize should be wine.

All at once, I came to and realized I had no idea where I was. I just knew I was no longer in the city. Instead, the bus appeared to be heading into a vast black void. There were no houses here, no streetlights, but there was, inexplicably, a lone bus stop. So, I decided it made sense to get off there.

The thing about missing your stop in the city is that retracing your steps is a fairly straightforward process, even if you are in your No Fucks Given Era and traveling without navigational devices of any kind. The thing about getting to the void before you’ve realized you’ve missed your stop is that the world will stop making sense, and you’ll be deposited on the side of a freeway.

I’d never seen a freeway with a bus stop, so I was puzzling over this as the bus pulled away, leaving me teetering drunkenly on the narrow shoulder. Recognition dawned slowly, filtering into my mind like molasses before congealing into a warning.

I looked to my left and saw Vespas shrieking toward me like errant bullets, painting the turnpike with comets of light. Each was driven as if destroying tourists awarded them points in some delightful game. This, I would discover, is how all Italians drive, so my advice is to stay off the freeways at all costs. But, should you happen to find yourself drunkenly standing on one, the solution is to leap over the guardrail. 

In my mind, I ballet leaped. In reality, my body went for it and thought the better of it at the same time, which led to me sliding awkwardly over the metal divider, scraping my lady bits and smashing to the ground on the opposite side. The maneuver earned me a burning welt across my rear, which, as I got to my feet shakily, became illuminated in the headlights of the drivers who were whizzing by with maniacal glee. By some marvel of physics, in those short, graceless seconds, the seat of my pants had completely disintegrated.

I was safe on the far side of the guardrail, though, so I took that as a win, if only to keep from crying that my entire ass was now exposed. I had no jacket to cover up with and no shoulder bag to wear awkwardly so my least favorite body part wouldn’t be prominently on display. It was fortunate, I guess, that all I could see in any direction was darkness and freeway. But it was unfortunate that there wasn’t a walking path back toward the city. And if I wanted to catch the bus going the opposite direction, I’d have to Frogger my way across eight lanes of traffic. 

So, I did the only reasonable thing I could and plunged into the darkness. Flashlights weren’t yet a standard phone feature, and the only other illumination came from the headlights growing distant behind me, so I flailed, wild and blind, through the strange wilderness. I encountered thorn-covered brambles and treacherous ditches. I fell down a lot. I cursed my misfortune by screaming at the sky like they do in the movies.

After approximately three hours of army crawling through what I was sure was poison ivy and narrowly escaping animal attacks that could have been imagined, I spotted a lone gas station. It looked out of place in the outback, but the lights were on, and that seemed promising. A huge barbed wire fence stood between it and me—because that’s how you “go big” in the Murphy’s Law department. Undeterred, I heaved myself over it like a manatee. 

Thankfully numb to the lacerations I’d just sustained, I emerged from the darkness with all the drama of the Swamp Thing, covered in foxtails and mud and hiccupping pathetically. I stood like a human tumbleweed before the perplexed station attendant, vigorously blaspheming the Italian language in an effort to get him to call me a taxi. 

Then, I waited for approximately one year. It was unbearably cold with a fully exposed tuchus, so to distract myself from freezing to death, I learned how to thank the nice man, via translation book, for looking after me. This was because I was under the impression he had called me a taxi. So 100 days later, when the cops arrived, I tried very hard to find "You suck" in the book. It wasn’t there.

Neither officer spoke a word of English, which felt appropriate for how things were going. I suppressed the urge to giggle hysterically, not wanting to look as unhinged as I felt. The guys began a game of charades, which would have been a lot more fun if we’d had some wine.

Eventually, I deduced that they wanted to see my documentation, but it was nowhere to be found. Both of my credit cards and all of my cash were also gone. Perhaps while I’d stood troubling over my abrupt nudity, I’d been pickpocketed by a silver-fingered paisano as he sped by on a Vespa. I wondered how many points they got for that. 

My pants were FUBAR, and I was a dirty, bloody mess, which made it impossible to convince the two officers that I had not been beaten or mugged. I flipped uselessly through my book, looking for how to say, No, sirs, I have not been raped, but am, in fact, just a drunken fool lost in the Roman jungle, who coincidentally misplaced all proper identification. 

I mostly just repeated the word “perso”—or lost—over and over, to which the men responded with the English word "attacked” each and every time. This must be a game, also. Fifty points for making the foreign girl cry. 

They did say another word—“boyfriend”—whose failure to present himself was an impossible puzzle to them. They were determined not to believe I was traveling alone. Feeling a bit like Alice in Wonderland, I attempted an epic charades performance conveying that I had just arrived in Italy—by myself—and would be here for three months. They didn’t get it. I doubt it was due to my acting, which was impressive. I rather think it was sheer refusal to believe anyone would send a half-naked American girl with no sense of direction and a drinking problem to a foreign country for three months alone. 

A brilliant idea occurred to me then, and I gave the carabinieri the number for the restaurant I had dined in, thinking perhaps we could at least solve the mystery of where my credit cards had gone. An English-speaking waitress answered (things were looking up!), and the officers handed me the phone so I could ask her to act as a translator. Perhaps she had PTSD from being a translator in the past, or maybe a drunk American girl had run over her dog, but in any case, she hated me instantly. She furiously demanded to know whether I had been robbed, which she communicated to the officers in clipped Italian before slamming down the phone.  

By now, I was exhausted to the point of complete surrender. I allowed myself to be poured into the back of the police car, which should have been alarming, but it was warm, so it felt like an improvement. To my immense relief, we soon pulled up outside the Order of Santa Brigida. 

The men let me out, and I smiled woozily, eager to put the evening behind me. I could deal with the fallout of having no money or ID after a nice long sleep. Thanks for the ride, gents; it’s been a gas. I turned away from them, strategically plotting my re-entry so I wouldn’t draw attention to the fact that I was coming in after curfew. That’s when one of the men cleared his throat.

I turned back slowly. “Sì?” I sighed.

More charades. They wanted to see my passport, which, in a singular moment of good judgment, I had left in my room. I thought about explaining that members of the opposite sex were forbidden, so drunkenly bringing two guys in uniform up to my bedroom while wearing assless chaps was a really bad idea. But how do you say that in charades?

With great reluctance, I opened the gate and led them up the pitch-black stairwell, trying to express the necessity of absolute silence. They took my shushing as a hilarious suggestion and shushed me back loudly, ensuring we were neither stealthy nor quiet. Because I was so stinking tired, so close to bed and it appeared I wasn’t in trouble, I let the unhinged giggles come. 

And the most amazing thing happened.

The guys began laughing, too, their mirth joining with mine and picking up speed like a runaway train. We were enjoying ourselves—and each other—despite not even speaking the same language. One of the officers shoulder-checked me, but gently, like an older brother would do, and I momentarily forgot being mortified, defeated and heartbroken. 

When I responded to the shove by throwing “girl” punches, I wasn’t pretending to tussle with an officer of the law or even a stranger; I was sharing a hilarious moment with a fellow messy human. I was in for some hard days ahead without credit cards and ID, but I felt better for the first time in ages.

Back in my room, seeking confirmation I wasn’t in trouble, I held my wrists out to the men like a question. Are you going to arrest me? More laughter. The one closest to me pointed to his handcuffs and then to the headboard and howled in amusement. The other gestured toward a pair of jeans air-drying on the bathroom door, and pantomimed covering my ass. We cackled until the tears came.

Truth is stranger than fiction, especially when you live your life going big. But I guess sometimes it takes absurd circumstances and bare-assed vulnerability to find your way back to connection. That night, I was gifted a moment I could cling to amidst the chaos of my life. A snapshot of joy that served as the first step in putting back together the pieces of my heart, of finding my way back to me.

The girl who can’t help but go big.

Originally published on JennieOConnor.com.

Are you also a fan of wine? Then make this sangria immediately. No judgment if you use the real thing; just maybe don’t drink the whole bottle. 🥴

We were on the clock and supposed to be finding me a work uniform, but instead, Becca and I were trying on jeans at the Macy’s across the street.

Becca was my beautiful, bubbly coworker who was, among other things, little. As in tall, but skinny. As in someone with a body type to envy.

That's why I assumed she’d lost her mind when she tossed the jeans she had just tried on over the dressing room wall to me and said, “Hey, try these.”

“I am not the same size as you,” I replied, shocked by the suggestion.

“You’re exactly my size,” she said, with a finality that left no room for debate.

So, I figured I’d just show her how wrong she was. I pulled the jeans up my legs and over my hips, held my breath, and zipped. They fit. In fact, they fit perfectly without me even having to suck in my stomach.

Like a record scratch, I was stupefied—disbelieving as I stared silently at my reflection enveloped in the soft denim. It felt like I had awakened in someone else’s body à la Freaky Friday. Because in my reality, I was a size 14 woman.

And Becca was a size four.

At 24, I had never heard of body dysmorphia, probably because social media wasn’t a thing and the term had yet to become a buzzword. Even though I could finally see the psychosis I was suffering from, it would be more than a decade before I’d have a conversation with a friend who would use the term, and I’d finally have language for my experience.

That friend suffered from body dysmorphia, too, which was intriguing because he’s a man. Even though the beauty industry targets women, it seems men are not immune to image-related self-hatred. When this friend looked in the mirror, he saw a skinny-necked, acne-ridden, awkward, lanky kid.

The reality was that he was a gorgeous, well-put-together, muscle-endowed hunk. The disconnect astounded me, and it took that second experience for me to truly see the gaping divide between my self-perception and the truth.

When I was 11 years old, my mom started going to The Diet Center. Putting me on the same diet was a convenience for her and an unfortunate hell sentence for me. I remember dreaming of a tasty Cup O’ Noodles at lunchtime while I morosely ate my hard-boiled egg and Wasa bread that is really just corrugated cardboard wrapped in a package and sold as crackers. It’s as dry as it sounds and flavorless, but after eating little else for the entirety of 5th grade, I had lost 17 pounds.

At the same time, per The Diet Center’s instructions, I developed the habit of weighing myself daily—to either celebrate that all that calorie counting was getting me the desired results or to abuse myself for the next 24 hours into doing better. I learned all the tricks for manipulating the scale, too: don’t wear clothing or shoes and weigh yourself first thing in the morning AFTER peeing. I remember standing on my tiptoes, convinced that if I was higher in the sky, I was dispersing some of that weight into the ether.

Eventually, I snapped out of it, realized this habit was psychotic and got rid of the scale. Aside from doctor’s offices, I’ve never stepped on one since. I wish the story ended there, but this demon has its claws in deep.

In high school, a boy on the water polo team nicknamed me “ghetto booty.” We barely spoke, he and I, but I was the team manager and scorekeeper, and my boyfriend played for the team, so the news trickled back to me somehow. I’m sure I was unnaturally obsessed with that particular body part before I was given the nickname, but that ensured a lasting self-hatred.

In a weird turn of events, I would drive that same boy home more than a decade later, and when he drunkenly tried to flirt with me, I would tell him how that nickname had haunted me my whole life. Of course, he had no memory of calling me that. He became quite lucid as he apologized, though, clearly affected by the idea that he’d so carelessly hurt someone once without meaning to. I appreciated the sentiment, and I feel weird now when we run into each other around town, and he’s overly nice to me. But it didn’t change anything. It didn’t undo the years I spent obsessing. It doesn’t stop some other thoughtless teenager from triggering someone else’s lifetime of self-loathing. It just is.

I watched a video from an expert on body dysmorphia who said she “couldn’t leave the house for a month” because of her self-hatred. She said she’s tired of influencers self-diagnosing and throwing the word around online. If those parameters are what’s required to be legit, maybe I’m not. Then again, I check several of the following boxes.

Signs you may have body dysmorphia:

• Being preoccupied with minor or imaginary physical flaws, which usually can’t be seen by others

• Having a strong belief that you have a defect in your appearance that makes you ugly or deformed

• Having anxiety and stress about the perceived flaw and spending a lot of time focusing on it

• Comparing your appearance with others to the point that it becomes an obsession

• Constantly seeking reassurance from others about how you look and then not believing them when they compliment you

• Getting cosmetic surgery but not being happy with the outcome—often many times over

I sometimes feel like we’ve taken the Big Dick Contest approach to trauma. Mine’s the biggest in the room . . . yours doesn’t come with a title bestowed upon you by a stranger with a clipboard.

I saw a reflection in the mirror that was patently false for years and moved through the world that entire time with a low level self-hatred. BUT, I was able to leave the house, so maybe it doesn’t count. If there’s a danger that sharing my story will somehow belittle someone else’s experience, I’ll make up a different word for it. Call it body perspective fuckedupness. Call it hallucinatory self-image syndrome. Call it reverse Shallow Hal disorder. But let us name the monster something and thereby take away its power.

It turns out one in every 50 people has body dysmorphia, and what makes it so insidious is that they have no awareness it’s happening. It’s just what normal feels like. For Gen Xers especially, who pride ourselves on being thick-skinned, I worry we may have normalized these hate crimes we’re enacting against ourselves.

The younger generations may come across as delicate, but the upside of this is their unwillingness to stand for bullshit. My favorite example of fighting the patriarchy responsible for this epidemic is this anti-establishment gem.

Jax, the artist behind this anthem, was inspired to write it for the teenager she babysits after a particularly hard day for the teen when some mean girls told her she was “flat and fat in all the wrong places.” The teen is a textbook beanpole, so the use of the word “fat” is absurd on every level. I’m also 100% certain that girls who feel compelled to say such things to other girls hate their own reflections in the mirror.

The song went viral on TikTok and resulted in many well-deserved endorsements, including a reprise with Shania Twain. Jax went on to organize an inclusive flashmob outside of the Victoria’s Secret store on the Santa Monica Promenade, and not once have I been able to watch the video of it without dissolving into sobs. Being moved by this story in such a dramatic way was another defining moment that said I’m still not done with this journey. Perhaps I’ll never be.

In Jax’s own words, inciting self-loathing is how the beauty industry makes money. She writes, “They will use your pain to keep business alive. You will go to war with yourself. War makes rich people richer.”

The message she leaves us with, however, is the same one I have been trying for two decades to internalize. My hope is that it cuts through all the nonsense you might be telling yourself, too, so it can take root in your mind and let acceptance and self-love bloom instead.

You have always been beautiful.

You were never ugly.

Say it with me.

Originally published on JennieOConnor.com.

Why not up your self-love game with something delicious?

“Are you CRYING?!” my coworker shout-whispers as I stand behind the bar, frozen mid-shake, watching Tara play a real doll on the TV mounted in the corner. Tara is another staff member who I know has aspirations of becoming an actress. And here she is on TV. In a non-speaking role—not that it matters—because her face is plastered all over the screen. Of course I’m crying! Why isn’t everybody?

My coworker watches me do facial theatrics to keep the tears at bay and sighs. The fact that my heart is exploding with pride is an inconvenience to him. Table five requires their dirty martinis. 

The world needs more empathy, they say. We need to care more, to not turn away from suffering, to react compassionately. It will better society, they say.

To which I say: Good luck getting anything done.

The theater is electric with anticipation as the light fades and the orchestra trills a sweet invitation. I feel the percussion building in my chest like a second heartbeat, provoking a livewire of recollection. First a trickle, then a flood. 

Long hours in the costume shop bent over a sewing machine, the excitement-tinged panic of opening night, camaraderie that declared, These people are my forever family, which was true. Until the next show. 

There can be no greater feeling than this, 21-year-old New York City-dwelling me says from the bottom of a memory. I remember that once upon a time, this was my magic, and for a moment, I let this feeling be true.

By the time the actors say their opening lines, I am sobbing–as silently as possible–the tears on my neck turning my collar soggy. I exit the theater, swollen and puffy-eyed, no doubt leaving other audience members questioning whether we watched the same performance. Over the years, the shows change, but my reaction to them stays the same.

This is a tick in the “pro” column of empathy. Potent, heart-swelling, rib-cracking feels—reminding you that you’re alive.

I read somewhere that empathy is a superpower and fantasize that I am a witch with enviable magick, more valuable than it is embarrassing. I scan my life for examples and notice how often people share extremely personal secrets with me. Once upon a time, when curfew arrived with the clicking on of streetlights, I cared about things like this. Because secrets meant inclusion.

Now, I get the sense that everyone is just seeking affordable therapy. 

Sometimes, I swell with self-importance about being a great listener. This is an admirable quality, right? Something others might want but not come close to replicating? It’s a superpower, I remind myself, as I’m cornered in conversation until my bladder explodes, with nary a pause in my captor’s storytelling to make my escape.

“People just seem to bond with me,” I say in passing to a friend, shrugging like it’s no big deal.  

“Why do you always make them cry?” he asks me in response.

Elizabeth Gilbert comes to my hometown to talk about her book, Big Magic. A friend of my mother’s suggests I take her extra ticket, knowing, as she does, that I’m a fan. Liz’s words instantly connect with the stymied artist inside me, the small, scared inner child who just wants to finger-paint the world. I feel like she has set some caged part of me free, and I’m tempted to rush the stage and hug her. But that’s crazy, so I sit in my seat and quietly cry. I cry so hard there’s snot that I’m ill-prepared to deal with. My mother’s friend shrivels with mortification, and I get the message that my extreme emotions make others uncomfortable. 

I troubleshoot the problem by warning the people in my life that I am strangely sensitive, wish I weren’t, sorry about that. My best friend responds by changing the channel whenever ASPCA commercials come on. We’ve cried together during many an animated film while his daughter rolled her eyes, so he gets me.

The next time I see my mother, however, she dives into a story about an old dog who always gets overlooked for adoption by the families who come to the shelter. I ask her to stop, but she ignores my pleas and barrels ahead. When she finishes the story, I am sobbing. 

“But it’s a happy ending!” she cries, looking at me bewildered, like I am an alien being she’ll never understand.

I decide maybe I’m not good at telling people what I need. I come to this conclusion while on a date with a man who is viciously reprimanding his employees on speakerphone for my benefit. While he shoots me an indelicate smile of the get-a-load-of-this-guy variety, I try not to throw up. 

The struggle comes to a head in election years. It wasn’t always this way. Or maybe I’m just more aware now that most of the emotions I feel don’t actually belong to me. Back then, I just lived every day with what I thought was a wicked hangover.

My mom wants me to be more involved. She wants me to write political postcards and engage in intellectual discourse about surviving a literal Handmaid’s Tale and be indignant every day by 9 am. She tells me how a recent school shooting in which four people died was later described as a “fact of life.” I feel like an elephant is standing on my chest.

I wonder if she’s a sadist or if she just forgets in her quest for crusade companions that her only child will spend the entire revolution rocking back and forth in the corner, and that’s no good to anybody. I know it’s nonsensical to most of my friends and loved ones that I metaphorically wrap myself daily in a pillar of white light and have deleted social media like a true misanthrope. But when people spew vitriol and call each other the sorts of names we used in elementary school, it makes a messy mosaic of my heart.

I think of the name-calling days whenever I walk by the house with the sign reading, “Joe and the ho gotta go.” I wonder how many of us will die with the emotional intelligence we had as sixth graders.

For my mom, fighting is the antidote to complacency. For me, complacency is the key to survival. I can’t offer the world any more than the vision that good will prevail.

I’ll show up. I’ll vote with my big bleeding heart. And I’ll trust in the vision. 

For now, though, I must retreat. I will wander in the desert, lose myself in fantasy, bury my head in the sand and hold the vision. I will anoint myself with protection oil, don smoky quartz and tourmaline and disappear from the world.

If you need me, I’ll be in a blanket fort with a basket of pumpkin chocolate chip muffins, reading about witches. I’ll be gluing pieces of myself back together with a steady stream of Ryan Reynold’s movies and building up my mental armor because that’s the only guarantee I’m getting out of this alive.

And from deep within the protective cocoon of my blanket fort, with every living cell of my sloppy heart, I’ll be holding the vision.

Fellow empaths, how are you self-soothing in these turbulent times? If you have a favorite ritual or guided meditation, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Originally published on JennieOConnor.com.

One way to hold the vision is to bless the space you’re already in. In other words, practice gratitude for that pillow fort. This will help . . .

It's no picnic being born the day after the 4th of July.

Everyone is hungover and wants nothing to do with another party. That’s if your friends are even in town at all.

I started celebrating on the 4th itself, when people were gathered for a different reason, and I could piggyback off that enthusiasm.

But that, in turn, meant long lines to get into bars, miserable traffic and one drunken fight that led to a break-up on my actual birthday.

This year, I decided to stop celebrating at all unless it involves me flying to a spiritual retreat center for the weekend.

That decision left a void, however.

Now, there was nothing to look forward to for the entire summer season.

Travel?

Sure. But I try to travel year-round.

Being outdoors?

With historical highs of 127 degrees F here in the valley, that's a hard pass.

In the six years I've lived in Palm Desert - where winter is a veritable Garden of Eden - I have developed a hate-hate relationship with summer. I apparently have reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder, meaning I get super pissed when I can't spend time outside for multiple days in a row. Throw in fire season, and it's a real hootenanny.

The other seasons have holidays, and I love me some holidays. Huge Tupperware boxes in bright colors line the shelves in my garage, each struggling to contain seasonally themed craft projects and home decor.

When I discovered that witches celebrate more holidays than Christians, giving me more occasions to decorate, I signed up immediately.

But despite there being two summer sabbats, AKA pagan holidays, I refused to celebrate them for years because I felt summer was a time with zero cause to be grateful.

But that's where I got it wrong.

This year has been positively roaring with abundance. Everywhere I turn, I am blown away by the proof that delusional self-belief pays dividends.

In the midst of watching gratitude beget more to be grateful for, it occurred to me that I was taking the wrong approach to summer. In order for it to be kinder to me, I had to start by being kinder to it.

I'm such a believer that we create our own realities, yet here I’ve been stuck in the narrative that the desert is an awful place to live for 3+ months out of every year.

So I did what I do best and rabbit holed over the summer sabbats.

I learned that Litha is the festival of Midsummer, that Midsummer festivals are rad, and that this is the best time of year for solar magick.

I discovered that Lammas means "loaf mass," and that bread is the centerpiece of the season’s feasts. Then I made a GF version of this fabulous cheesy herb bread to celebrate the fact that ancient peoples had the good sense to devote an entire festival to bread.

The other name for Lammas—Lughnasadh—is a nod to the God Lugh, who is the patron of Jacks-of-all-trades. I’d been searching for a God to work with, so I’m ecstatic that he presented himself to me!

After months of not changing my altar decor, I finally swapped out the white velvet tablecloth (from Imbolc 😱) for a sage-colored satin that I have used in the past for Ostara—but which I love in contrast to the sunflowers and mini corn right now.

Copper taper candles complete the tableau with the Goddess and God represented by tiny brown and gold candles, respectively.

Speaking of mini corn, I ordered 30 of those puppies from a farm on the East Coast, and when they arrived, Hecate and I made a mini Indian corn wreath. And by made, I mean I hot-glued corn to a straw wreath form while Hecate voraciously attacked the corn stalks as if they'd been dipped in catnip.

Oh, and how could I forget the most delicious baked good I have ever made in 46 years of life on this planet?

I made these Strawberry Honey Solstice Cakes first for Litha and then again for Lughnasadh—with peaches the second time around. I may try them with plums in the fall and something else (pears?) in winter.

Strawberry Honey Solstice Cakes

INGREDIENTS

3/4 cup cornmeal
1 1/4 cup all-purpose gluten-free flour
1/4 cup sugar (I omitted)
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup oat milk
1 tsp of cinnamon
1/2 cup honey
2 cinnamon sticks
1/4 cup butter
6 strawberries sliced thin

INSTRUCTIONS

Preheat oven to 350. Line a muffin tin with parchment or silicone muffin cups.

In a saucepan over medium heat, bring the butter, milk, cinnamon, and cinnamon sticks to a simmer. Stir occasionally.

Remove from heat when butter is melted. Add the honey and let the cinnamon sticks steep for 15 minutes. *I forgot to remove from heat the first time - don’t do what I did.*

In a mixing bowl, whisk cornmeal, flour, baking powder and salt.

Remove the cinnamon stick from the milk. Add the milk to the dry ingredients and mix until combined.

Pour half the batter into the muffin cups. Add a few strawberry slices, and top with remaining batter.

Add one more strawberry slice as decoration.

Bake in the oven for 23-27 minutes. When you smell them, they’re done.

Let cool for 15 minutes or longer before removing from the muffin tin.

As a child, my favorite breakfast was cornmeal pancakes. I would top one with jam, one with cinnamon sugar and one with rich, whipped honey. This cake tastes that breakfast.

Thus, with a perfect score on the nostalgia scale, I could eat this cake alone for the rest of my life and be totally content.

Reflecting on my changed attitude toward summer, it makes sense that this year has been significantly cooler than any in recent memory, and we have had almost no fire season to speak of. (Others have, and my empath heart goes out to them, but we are so far unscathed).

Best yet, I have found ways to stay active. Getting up at 6 a.m. has brought unexpected joys, and mall walking is a surprisingly pleasurable activity. I play a game with myself to try and spot the other people who are also there to get an air-conditioned workout.

All of this has served to remind me that we get to choose how we view our world. If things are perpetually shitty, we must choose differently.

I did.

And the world, according to me, is a much better place to live in now.

What situation in your life needs a fresh perspective? Drop a reframe in the comments to help you begin to rewrite that story.

If you’re stumped, tell me about it and I’ll give you a hand. 💜

Trying to improve your life for the (way) better? Try this recipe + ritual for personal transformation.