Yes

What if everything you most want is on offer to you...right now?

What if you're the one delaying your own good, by refusing to take the risk to claim what's yours?

What if the fear you feel is only a mirage, and under its ghostly form is the ability to experience total and complete happiness?

(Including some really good juice.)

Venice, Vidi, Vici

In lieu of an Italian vacation, I spent yesterday in Venice. Substitute a forty-five minute drive for an eleven hour flight. Substitute grains of sand on the beach for legions of pigeons. Substitute a parade of teen skateboarders for slick commuters on Vespas. Substitute eating salad with yuzu-carrot-ginger dressing and iced green tea next to a surf shop for pasta marinara and wine at a trattoria in a piazza. Substitute a fantastic friend walking about with me for my true love beside me. Substitute all this with all intention for that, too.

Reasons You Cannot Wear That to Work, As Explained by an Logician

You now have before you the new dress code policy for your workplace. Perhaps management did not fully go over the reasons behind these choices for the staff. I, a highly skilled analyst, will now explain to you why.

* Attire that reveals a midriff. This is clearly because women's belly buttons are where the man sticks his, you know. (Have I ever...? I have spent the last seventeen years at MIT. What do you think?) Not to mention the belly button is where the baby used to be attached to the mother, so it's like being reminded of your pretty coworker hanging out with another woman, when she was young and naked all the time.

* Skirts that are shorter than three inches above the knee when in a standing position. Measurements are taken this way to respect the disabilities of our staff that cannot sit or lie down. Why the knee? It's where the leg stops being the calf, and becomes sexy. Three inches above the knee puts us at approximately seventeen inches away from the belly button.

* Attire that is designated as sleepwear, underwear, or swimwear. This is so that clients and coworkers alike will not get confused, thinking you are about to take a nap, get undressed, or do the breaststroke. In fact, although their perceptual apparatuses may provide them with data points suggesting you are not participating in these activities, you may in fact already be doing these things. Management does not have time to tell you to wake up or stay out of the deep end.

* Attire that has offensive and/or derogatory terminology or graphics. With the use of and/or, you can no longer get away with something offensive but not derogatory, or derogatory but not offensive. For instance, whereas you once could wear a t-shirt worshipping Satan (offensive, but not derogatory, since Satan seems to have an open-door policy), or a t-shirt proclaiming your hatred of marshmallows (derogatory, but not particularly offensive since marshmallows are not actually that delicious), you cannot don slurs to any gender, national, or ethnic group. Note that non-offensive and non-derogatory graphics and terminology are not mentioned, ergo you are free to wear a dress printed with cheerful dancing unicorns playing in vats of butter.

* Heels should be no higher than three and a half inches. This is because anyone who wears four inch heels will be able to reach stuff on the top shelves better. What did we buy a ladder for, then? We spent our hard-earned money on that ladder. Wear flats.

* Any attire that is provocative, inappropriately revealing, or see-through. Look: if you're going to choose an outfit with mysteriously good French seams that allows us to witness your clavicle through a peep-hole in the garment, just go work somewhere else. It is not worth the damage that will be done by our staff falling over in shock at the sight of you, disturbed that underneath those clothes you are naked and over that nakedness are those...those clothes.

Mature Alternatives to Wearing a Self-Esteem T-Shirt

In the spirit of the Roaring 20s, step out in a hat worn at a rakish angle, paired with spats and a shiny cane.

Dress up as God’s creation, which you so ever much are, as demonstrated by wearing lilies of the valley pinned to every surface of your white pantsuit.

Have self-esteem.

Things I Have Imagined About My Friend Tim

That he will, along with our friend Hart, be one of my bridesmaids when I get married. Even if that means he wears his Teddy Ruxpin post-doctoral interviewing outfit.

That he will successfully mount the play he wrote involving a character named Audrey, based on me, based on my love of pink and a certain expletive, and that I will in fact have my Broadway debut as a version of myself, which is to say that casting will not prefer Alison Pill.

That he will 1) Purchase an ostrich egg at Whole Foods for $40; 2) Locate an ostrich; 3) Have the ostrich sit on, and then hatch, the egg; 4) Sew tweed suits for the two ostriches; 5) Dress the ostriches, then himself, and go out on the town as a trio of gentlemen.

Acquire a needlefelt brain.

Half-Birthday

Today is my half-birthday! Although it is very June gloomy outside, that cannot stop me from any of the possible half-birthday celebration techniques available. Keep this list handy for when yours rolls around:

* Purchase a half cake. Make sure it is awkwardly cut straight down the middle, and then insist that the bakery save the other half for when it is your real birthday.

* Take an inventory of the last six months of your life while wearing a tiara and a t-shirt that reads, ever so articulately, "ME."

* Take back the reign of Lewis Carroll's "unbirthday" concept by graffiti-ing ALICE HAD IT ALL WRONG on a wall somewhere. Get caught and resist arrest so you have a charming story about jail to tell on your actual birthday.

Photograph by Leslie Weinberg.

Highly Effective Uses for Today's Lunar Eclipse

Today there is a lunar eclipse along with the full moon in Sagittarius. What does one do with such a momentous event? Here are some productive ways to maximize the astrological current you're swimming in.

* Draw up a garbage bag and fill that Hefty with all the stuff you no longer want. Items could include unkind coworkers, outdated ideas of looking at yourself, and that old bartending kit that made one round of margaritas and then called it a day.

* Enact the cosmological event in order to feel more close to it. Dress up like a half-man, half-horse, and show off your rear until your Golden Retriever walks by. Act pleased when you notice the humans on Earth read the astrology advice columns and stopped doing unproductive things in response.

* Write the moon a heartfelt letter, explaining that you know it's still there.

Small Dog Presented as Large Dog

Mural glorifies, distorts an animal that could fit in a purse. I may have to sew a giant handbag around this Silverlake block just to regain perspective.

It's either that or fly myself out in a helicopter far enough away to rectify scale.

Recycling Bin Treasures: Botox And

At work I found this lavender slip of paper in the recycling bin, in all its reassuring tone of voice. What, I wonder, was the other product? Here are some possibilities:

A) Botox and a mirror with frown lines drawn in. Inject enough Botox until the frown lines disappear from both your face and the drawing of your face on the mirror.

B) Botox and a puppy. If you smile too much at the puppy, you might get your frown lines back. If you inject too much Botox, the puppy might not know you are smiling at him.

C) Botox and a rubber Gertrude Stein mask. Are you more yourself when you wear one or the other?

D) Botox and a syringe of maple syrup, which you can put in your coffee instead of sugar. Since when are they bottling maple syrup in syringes? Is it more helpful when removing the sap from the tree?

E) Botox and a baby bag filled with diapers, pacifiers, rattles, and a blankey. Figure out what to use to retain your youthfulness.

F) Botox and a book. Decide whether you want to think about your face, or think with what's inside your face.

Gas Matters

There is no clearer sign that our current social media platforms have hit rock bottom than that I got a request in the mail to "like" the company that supplies my apartment with gas. While I appreciate Sempra Energy, do I really want to be friends with them on Facebook? Or say that I "like" gas? This is the point in the intervention where all the businesses now crowding what was once a place to connect with your dormmates need to be sat down and ever so gently but firmly have the cursor pad taken away from them.

Equally Valid Optimism Via Fruit

Cherries notwithstanding, life is just a plate of grapeys!

Talk Isn't Cheap

These days, it's common to get away with substituting conversation with texting, which is another way of saying that full language can be swapped out for brief symbols. Why negotiate the complexity of human relationships when you can send a smoke signal instead? Forget spelling, respect, and talking out loud. LOL! LMAO! OMFG! Maybe "I'll talk to you" is the new "I love you." Or maybe instead of roping steer and gunning down the bad guys, alpha males can show their prowess through a face-to-face conversation. "What's on your mind?" the virile will say. "Let's talk about it." Girls and boys, take the dictionary off the shelf and use it.

No Nude Mimes

Imagine that you are a mime. You have just found a casting notice for a role you can do! Alas, if you are female and acting on camera, you must have to take off your underpants. What's this? A part that lets you tell a story without words or sound while keeping your black unitard on? Ladies of the panto, rejoice. This director must truly be a visionary, to imagine you pulling an invisible rope and dressed at exactly the same time.

"April" Abroad

"April", that winsome mockumentary that I am so happy to be a part of, is now showing online with the UK-based Itzon.TV Film Festival. It's free to watch, and offers a full screen, high definition viewing experience. The finalists in the festival are decided by audience votes. Please create a free profile, watch the film, and vote for us! You can watch at the following scheduled times (Wednesday 5/18/11: 5:28PM, Thursday 5/19/11: 7:41PM, Friday 5/20/11: 6:31AM, Saturday 5/21/11: 12:45PM, Sunday 5/22/11: 4:29AM, Monday 5/23/11: 9:56AM, Tuesday 5/24/11: 7:18AM) or use their on-demand function. Times are either adjusted for various zones as indicated, or someone's a jokester over at Itzon. Check it out!

Phrase of Our Lives

"No way!" I thought in response to Amazon's downstream suggestion. Purchase my books (and favorite French anise-flavored candy) and allow access to my credit card information through the phrase "Audrey's Undisturbed Tensions"? Hopefully between the quality literature and the sweets my tensions would be entirely disturbed; rendered impotent and vanquished entirely. Too astute for its own good, Amazon's rejoinder was the suggestion of another phrase: how about "Audrey's Unbroken Candor"? Yes, Amazon, let's keep it real.

Snack Glove

If you are a doctor who might get hungry later, feel free to make a snack glove. Nothing for you but the most hygienic to finger those pecan bars.

Man Fall In Love

Some women keep reading material such as How To Make A Man Fall In Love With You ironically, like how they don't actually make waffles with their iron; but such books are funnier and do not require maple syrup, even hypothetically.

If you are enamored of someone who looks like a relative of Pac-man, this tome is for you! Perhaps, according to the author, your boyfriend is always listening, which he does by rotating his eyes back and forth:


In that case, perhaps you do not know if he is in love. Because this is what he looks like if he is:


You'll know a man loves you when he wears the pancakes you made on his eyes. That would be a good time to sketch him and turn those drawings into a video game. But hopefully with more smiling.

Toothy Grin

We all accept that dentists have the prerogative to advertise their services through use of a tooth logo. We acknowledge that in order to appear friendly and not too Little Shop of Horrors-y, they may choose to give that tooth a smile, thus rendering it less a glyph and more of a mascot.But what happens when that smile is so full, so radiant, as to reveal teeth? Where does something that started out as a welcoming gesture turn into a carnivalesque need for orthodonture? "Don't worry," says the winsome call of such a molar, "I can handle any meal all on my own."

Bake It Frost It Picture Take It

"Say cupcakes!" my lovely and talented photographer Erin Gibson urged, as we worked the big cartoon eyes and wavy (read: comedy) hair. Sitting in a West Hollywood garage in a tank top, you think to yourself, This is February, and maybe these photographs will launch my career, but right now—"CUPCAKES!"

Sleepless in Silverlake

It's been a good long while since I went nearly sleepless, but last night there was no rest for the wounded. In dreams we get some murky license for whimsy and experimentation, but in waking life it's all reality, reality, reality. Without the respite of my Zzzzs, I had to rely entirely on what was visible to my eyes but nonetheless seemed like apparitions:

*My cell phone displaying a photograph from the first of the year. In it, I simultaneously look deeply unglamorous and incredibly happy, proving there is an inverse relationship between makeup and joy.

*An episode of "Weeds" playing on my laptop, in which I ride a bicycle and the pink blotch of t-shirt with me in it keeps wending its way through various scenes. No one would know it's me; I am secretly haunting another narrative world.

*Vegan mochi ball ice cream. All those years of wishing they would make a non-dairy alternative produced the desired outcome, there in my hand. Don't pinch or dream me, I'm awake.