Perhaps...

this is why I'm paying 67% more in rent this year than I was last year.

Leave it to the NYTimes to blab to everyone far and near that my neighborhood is "Brooklyn's equivalent of the West Village: sophisticated, refined and slightly bohemian." And thanks for noting its "resemblance to a European village — the cute restaurants and bars...like you are living in a neighborhood in London, having the town houses, the butcher shop, the cheese shop and the fish shop. It makes you feel like you are living in a real place, rather than a mall or something."

Look for my rent to pop another 30% next year. Oh, if only I were a homeowner!

Target Market: NOT Me

The building in which I work contains the magazine Good Housekeeping. Those who grew up paging through their mother's subscription to GH (and wondering why in the world anyone would care about how to bake clafouti or polish silver) may be familiar with the "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval."

To GH's credit, the seal is not something they slap on any old product that advertisers ask them to. Products with a GH seal actually undergo rigorous testing in GH's test kitchens and labs, and if you don't believe me, come have lunch sometime and I'll take you to the 29th floor, where that part of GH is housed. On any given day you'll find an army of GH employees repeatedly vacuuming little patches of carpet or determining JUST HOW MANY washes a towel can undergo before it falls apart in your hands. On busier days around here, I gaze longingly through the GH window and dream of working in the test labs. Instead of staying on top of the 2.3 million tasks currently associated with launching the website I'm working on, I could spend all day frying egg after egg in a quest to determine the most slippery nonstick surface.

Anyway. Because they test all kinds of products, there are frequently weird little gadgets and gizmos laying around, and they're often the kind of stuff you might see on TBS infomercials if you stayed up late enough on a Tuesday.

The other day when I walked by, I saw such a gadget, named the "Wave Box." The Wave Box is a portable microwave that can be powered by battery or the cigarette lighter space in a car. This is all well and good. But what scared me was the picture on the back of the box: A bald, bespectacled man sitting in his car, the Wave Box firmly perched in the passenger seat, shoving a sandwich inside of the machine.

It was an awfully sad picture, and nothing has ever made me happier that I do not live in an exurb of Dallas.

You Know You're a Grown-Up When...

You agree to kick off your 32nd birthday by undergoing your annual exam at the gynecologist.

Don't Be Gentle

After a few days of realizing with building annoyance that my eyebrows were starting to resemble wiggly little caterpillars rather than svelte, foxily arched tools of come-hither, I knew it was time to find a waxing shop in my new work neighborhood. The girls in this building are likely the types who enjoy long, leisurely days at the spa, covering their pores in cucumber slices and and having each hair delicately plucked out with a thread while aromatherapy mists waft over their perfect ski-slope noses. But me? I like my waxing like girls with low self-esteem like their boyfriends: fast, cheap, and brutal. Slap it on, rip 'em out, that's what I say.

Which is why I knew I had to be very specific when I asked a coworker for a nail-shop suggestion: "Where can I go around here to find an Asian lady to dump hot wax on my face and rip all the hairs out of it?"

My to-the-point question received a to-the-point answer and my brows are, once again, looking lean and mean (if a little bit red and puffy). That's what you get when you ask for it rough.