Thought.is

You need another person to make sure you’re breathing and to prevent you from choking on your own vomit.

“He wanted you to cover your body in — what?”

As rallying cries go, “Artista, Erotica, Utopia!” is among the more ludicrous, especially for an underground pop-up strip club, where eager young women perform awkward erotic dance routines for a members-only crowd of well-off young gentlemen.

“Even if I were a blind guy and put my hands here”—he seizes my sides—“there are little lumps.”

At the age of 12, I begged my parents to send me to sleepaway camp. They complied, and I ended up at a place with a Native American-y name about three hours away from our home in Connecticut for a two-week stretch. Aside from being so miserable that I considered alleging sexual abuse by a counselor to convince my parents to collect me, a few things stood out.

For a long time, my foremost goal was to be a mom.

“That looks like a porn star,” I say, as it occurs to me how strange it is that our medical diagrams don’t depict variations in human anatomy.