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We can't explain why, but cougar hook-ups often make us feel kind of sad inside (which is not to say that we won't get hooked on the new cougar dating show), whereas long-term cougar relationships make us want to high-five the woman and then ask the couple to double-date. And who hasn't had a little relationship envy over Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins?

What do you call your vagina? I spent the weekend immersed in synonyms for vaginas and emerged completely repulsed by every single term anyone might use to express themselves when discussing the female--I don't even know what to call it anymore. Area. The female area. The area of the body that is so particularly particular to the female body. But that's kind of a mouthful, isn't it.

You spend the weekend talking about words you can use for the vagina, and suddenly, they all sound wrong, and terrible, and weird, and you become self-conscious about the whole enterprise, and want to just give it up--naming one, having one, using one. It's all way too complicated.
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One of the few subjects the two of us disagree on wholeheartedly is germs: Lo has never met a public toilet she didn't squat over, and Em, well, she'll squat over a gas station loo, but if it's in a powder room in a nice restaurant, she'll probably rest her weary quads and sit. But whether you're a lifelong squatter like Lo or just a gas-station one like Em, you'll appreciate the sentiment behind the Shenis. It's a 12-inch, hollow, gold (or black) fake penis that lets the fairer sex pee standing up, whether that's at a urinal, on a camping trip, or writing your name in the snow...

How does sexy go again?

Lingerie manufacturers want you to think that they have got the market cornered on being sexy--that you are magically granted magic thong powers when you snap that string into place, and you become a goddess of love, with great and glorious power over all sexual organs within your provenance. Which would be nice if it were entirely true, and if that was the entirety of the secret.

I wish it were as easy as lingerie, that cute underpants could solve everything, because this past almost-a-week, I have not felt sexy at all. I have felt more or less on the far bank from sexy. Sexy is sunning itself on one side of the tracks, in its condo's private rooftop garden in the expensive neighborhood with all the Rottweilers on Coach leashes, and I'm asking for spare change over here in the dark and tragic unsexy side of town, scratching my open lesions and wonder what, exactly, it is like to be loved. If I were to approach it, it would shriek Masher! and beat me away with its purse and then mace me for good measure.