Since then, I’ve been able to exercise some of the benefits of US citizenship. I have a US passport that permits me visa-free travel to more places than my Philippine passport ever could. I have voted in various elections.

There are also obligations to citizenship, one of which is serving on a jury. Something I’d been able to avoid the first two times I got a notice to appear for jury duty service.

1. First notice – not a citzen yet! Illinois pulls names from the DMV and voter registration rolls. A simple call got me out of it.
2. Second notice – my last name did not start with a letter in the range of names they needed.
3. Third notice – FUCK.

So this is why I had to get to 26th and California by 9:30 on a hot Tuesday morning. Yesterday morning, in fact. I gave myself an extra 30 minutes to get there, and I ended up needing that time because CTA customer service is terrible and so is the construction going on at UIC.

The courthouse stands on the southwest corner of its intersection. Just north of it, across 26th, is a Popeye’s which multiple Yelp reviewers advised going to for lunch. They had even less pleasant things to say about the courthouse cafeteria. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Getting through the metal detector took no time at all, as the line for ladies was much shorter than the one for dudes. As a juror, my electronics (iPhone, Kindle) were permitted. I can’t imagine what I would have done if I couldn’t have brought either. Read an actual book? No thank you. All the books I have to read at home are crazy heavy, and I am a delicate flower to be carrying heavy things around in the heat.

I took the elevator to the third floor, where I turned in my notice and in return received a panel number and a juror ID number. If my panel number was called, I would line up with the other folks who had the same number, and a deputy sheriff would take us to a courtroom for selection. Until then, I could sit in this waiting room that looked like it belonged in a small regional airport.

What few tables there were had been occupied by prospective jurors who pulled up chairs and watched videos on laptops or tablets. Unseen vending machines whirred in far off corners while I looked for a spot to park myself.

A short video featuring remarks by Timothy C. Evans, the Chief Judge of the Cook County Circuit Court, and hosted (!) by Lester Holt, thanked us for our service, and then walked us through what we could expect. Here’s the video if you want to watch it now:

It’s amazing. Check out the crazy lady perms on the defendants.

While I waited, I fucked around on Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook. I searched the room for cute boys. I bought myself a soda and made a note of how many Honey Buns were in the vending machine when I got there (3) and how many were left when I was let go for the day (1). Most importantly, I made a note of the different ways people pronounced the word “juror”:

• Jew-Roar
• Jer-Er
• Jer-Oar
• Juh-Oar
• Jer-Roar

Also I launched Tinder once, screamed, then shut it down forever. It’s not like of the many designated areas for activities such as talking on the telephone and being quiet there was one for making out with a fellow juror.

On Twitter, Patrick and I went back and forth on who would be on NY and Chicago editions of Mount Rushmore. For New York, I had Grandmaster Flash, George Steinbrenner, and a dollar slice of pizza. For Chicago, I listed Harold Washington, Daniel Burnham, Koko Taylor, and Lou Malnati. Other folks weighed in and that made me so glad. I also remembered that Boondocks episode “The Trial of R. Kelly” and that made me happy because that shit’s hilarious.

Four different panels were called and thankfully none of them were mine. We broke for lunch at 12:00 and despite having a turkey and cheddar Lunchable in my bag, I took my chances with the cafeteria. The only thing I will say is that the space itself was very nice and clean, and its employees were polite and professional. As to the food — while it is true that I have never met a steam table I didn’t like, yesterday’s steamed turkey with stuffing and mixed vegetables was a test of my patience. I also may have challenged Lloyd Bentsen in the 1988 vice presidential debates after sampling a corn muffin. I tweeted:

I’ve made corn muffins, eaten corn muffins. Corn muffins are friends of mine. Weird cafeteria pasty, you’re no corn muffin. #juryduty

We got 90 minutes for lunch, so I was back in my seat at 1:30. Around 2:10, a very nice lady from the jury duty office got on the PA system and said as the judges had called for all the juries they needed, we were free to go. I was like this:

After that announcement, all that was left was to collect our $25 (in check form, with three signatures and everything) and then, finally, what to do with ourselves for the rest of the day.

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When your lovely pals invite you to join them for post trick-or-treating snacks “any time after 5pm” that means you should probably try to get there not at 7:30pm.

The Halloween you swear you will address any small child dressed as Elsa from Frozen, sporting long white blond hair and a light blue gown, as Daenerys Stormborn or Khaleesi or Mother of Dragons is the day you will see no children wearing that costume.

Chicken chili and a baked potato with butter and sour cream make for the perfect meal on a wet and blustery Halloween tonight.

Taking the Clark bus through Wrigleyville on Halloween night makes for good entertainment.

Who knew there were so many sexy costumes in the world?

The best costume you’ll see on the aforementioned bus ride will be a homemade blowfish (with darts!) that crinkles up easily to sit down.

When you need a taxi to take you from Belmont & Broadway to Clark between Aldine & Buckingham on a sunny Saturday afternoon, you will instead walk (which you should have done in the first place) because all the taxis are already taken.

The best clothing options for babies and children are those that, in a pinch, could be used as a Halloween costume. Snowsuits and hoodies and jackets are not worth getting unless they have animal ears and tails and matching mittens that look like paws or hooves.

“North & South” (the English one with Richard Armitage, not the American mini-series with Patrick Swayze) was as swoon-inducing as all the gifsets on Tumblr would seem to indicate, and is currently streaming on Netflix.

Sometimes eating some mini microwaveable tacos (oy), then drinking three cokes, four glasses of water, eating scrambled eggs and pulled chicken and roasted potatoes and half of an incredible breakfast sandwich on focaccia and a thin slice of cake with not a lot of walking will yield a pre-dinner blood glucose reading of 132 mg/DL, which makes you think your pancreas is just fucking with you.

You’re never too old to wear a short skirt with black opaque tights. Nobody will judge you if you decide to hike your skirt just a smidge higher.

There’s always room for another tater tot or five.

Girls who are named after flowers do like getting gifts that smell like their flower unless it’s jasmine which is just too strong sometimes and maybe try orange blossom or a powdery rose instead.

Rehashing the party you just left with pals in the car ride home takes the sting out of having to leave the party (along with the handful of tater tots you have in your purse).

Writing a sample list for the judges of the University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt in 2014 when you’ve not written once since the fall of 1998 is both easier and harder than you remember.

Not leaving your house on a beautiful Sunday is okay. Try to remember this when the first polar vortex hits in January.

It’s worth taking the extra five minutes to research which states permit Election Day voter registration before you tweet that you can totally still register to vote on-line and vote in time for Tuesday.

Watching a man walk up a high wire that is strung up dozens of stories up and at a 19 degree angle on a cool Chicago night is actually more stressful/thrilling than that evening’s episode of “The Walking Dead”.

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Look at this pulled pork pot pie. It has wee pastry pig on top of it. It was delicious!

This is Patrick and Carly. We hung out at a live lit/storytelling event last week.

This is my friend Sam. Her eyeglasses game is strong.

This is my friend Lisa. She threw a super fun 10th anniversary party for Chicagoist, the blog of which is she Associate Editor. Lisa has amazing hair and is an incredible person.

I looked after the cats of some friends last week. On our last night together, I made cat circles. I think the circles were just a little too big. The cats were indifferent.

This is the U of C pep band playing “Livin’ on A Prayer” at Homecoming last weekend. There were corn dogs and temporary tattoos and walking tacos and grilled meat and a football game and lots of beer. It was super fun.

These are the insanely attractive people who showed up for 20×2 Chicago at Schubas.

Carly and I went to Uncle Mike’s Place for Filipino breakfast on Sunday. It’s one of our things. We’re trying to get a lot of things in before she moves to Algonquin and our new thing becomes going to Culver’s (OMG I hope this happens).

One of the places I go to be alone in Chicago (if only for a few minutes) is a car on the Ferris wheel at Navy Pier.

I saw Il Trovatore at the Lyrica Opera last night. This is the crazy-looking scrim.

Fortunately for Byl and his man Terry, a corn maze is one of many things in which I am interested, which includes but is not limited to:

• eyebrow maintenance
• Game of Thrones fan fiction
• pudding cups
• vintage stationery
• boys

I accepted their invitation to drive to the corn maze, and I got started thinking about what I was going to wear.

We ended up going on Saturday, which was rainy and a little cold. In the car, we decided to go to the Cracker Barrel in Gurnee for lunch. As much as we wanted to wait 35 minutes browsing oversize candy canes and testing the University of Illinois rocking chairs on the porch before we got to drink sweet tea and inhale chicken fried steak, we also wanted to eat in a timely fashion and get to the corn maze before it got too late. So we went to Golden Corral instead.

I’ve never been to a Golden Corral before. I don’t know if you have either. These are some thoughts I had:

• Golden Corral advertised an upcoming Veterans Day special where veterans eat free, and you may or may not be doing so in the company of Steppenwolf founder and Forrest Gump actor Gary Sinise.
• There is a literal corral you must walk through in order to get to the register, where you pay for the meal before you sit down.
• Of the three plate colors available, my favorite was the green.
• White people appeared to be in the minority at this particular location. I think most of the White people looking for lunch in the shadow of the Great America theme park next door were at the Cracker Barrel, or possibly Timothy O’ Toole’s.
• The dude manning the grill looked intense and not totally unattractive but I sensed there was a story there that I was not interested in hearing. Our one exchange was limited to me asking for steak, he asking me which temperature I wanted, me replying “Medium, please!” and ended with him dropping meat on my plate.
• I think “dropping meat on my plate” would make a funny if gross euphemism for sex.
• I remember trying: fried okra, corn, mashed potatoes with gravy, plain spaghetti with butter, fried shrimp, mystery pudding that ended up being banana. I drank root beer and Pepsi.
• Terry: “Is that fish?” Byl: “No, it’s pizza.”
• While we were there the restaurant played host to several large parties made up mostly of women celebrating the graduation of at least one in their party.
• Who graduates from school in October? That’s what Byl wanted to know.

We took a scenic route to the corn maze, located at Richardson Adventure Farm in Spring Grove. Terry drove while Byl and I tried to get good snaps of the fall foliage. Which is hard when the foliage in question is about a mile away from you, sitting in a moving car and working with an iPhone.

The corn maze at Richardson Adventure Farm claims to be the largest in the world. The maze had several paths cut through it, so that from the air you can see a picture. Every summer there is a different theme. This year’s was in celebration of the 200th anniversary of “The Star Spangled Banner”.

Inside the maze, I felt no swell of patriotism as I tried not to fall in the mud or injure myself with an errant corn cob. It’s not like they rigged hidden speakers to play the song while you made your way through. Mainly we checked the ground for the remains of illicit activity, or took pictures of ourselves looking fresh-faced in the corn. We walked away from the direction of the laughter of unaccompanied children, and stumbled onto the Christmas tree farm.

We were adorable.

In addition to the maze, you could Zorb (I’ll leave it to you to figure it out), ride a zip line (as long as you weighed at least 70 lbs. but no more than 250 lbs.), eat junk food, pick out pumpkins, pet animals, jump on air pillows, fling pumpkins off the top of a 90-foot tower, or slide down a very steep hill.

We instagrammed pretty much every moment that we weren’t eating, as you do.

When we stopped to get a funnel cake and a corn dog, we observed a bossy lady yelling at her boys to behave themselves while she placed her order. She had a lot of questions for the girls making the food. She ignored her husband who looked at us sheepishly as if to say “Sorry my wife’s taking so long with her yelling.” It was fine. I learned a long time ago that if you’re behind someone wearing Crocs that are two sizes too big and a grim expression, you give them all the room they need.

At top of the slide, Byl and I watched children take a running leap and then land on their backs seemingly halfway down before skidding to a stop just short of the muddy patch where parents stood taking pictures. Like the old people we were, Byl and I carefully positioned ourselves at the top, sitting and staring at the ground below. We had planned to slide down together but then Byl slipped and went first, hollering, fists raised in the air. I thought about chickening out, but then my ass found itself sliding over the edge, and I lay back, closing my eyes, and yelling as loud as I could.

And I’ve been pretty “Brooklyn sucks gentrification blah blah blah white people ruin everything” for the last few years but it took no more than a few hours of seeing people on the subway looking all happy with their babies and their produce and their interesting shoes to convince me that if this is where little baby Huck (M & C have been calling him “Figaro” but I KNOW BEST) is going to be born and raised, I’d better get on board the B (for Brooklyn! for baby!) train before I get left behind.

So this is the story of how I spent a little over 12 hours in New York City on Sunday.

3:30 AM: Wake up after fitful dreams of Aidan Gillen (yes really) to find Lola snoring on my face. Lola is the Cavalier King Charles I’m dog-sitting for a friend who is off on a much-needed vacation. Another friend will be checking on Lola while I am gone for the day.

4:00 AM: Dressed, I check Lola’s food and water bowls before showing her to her crate. I order a taxi via Hailo (probably for the last time). Get excited for the driver when I ask him to take me to O’Hare. #kaching

4:20 AM: Arrive at terminal 3 to find a decent amount of people at security. Sneer inwardly at everybody wearing baggy sweatpants and flip-flops.

4:30 AM: Sneer at people in long line for L-concourse Starbucks, which is not yet open.

4:40 AM: Enter long line for McDonald’s, where I order a bacon egg & cheese McGriddle. STOP JUDGING ME YOU DON’T KNOW MY LIFE.

5:05 AM: Gate L5. Inhale breakfast.

5:35 AM: Start boarding plane.

6:14 AM: Depart (I got the time from Flight Aware). I’m in 11D. There is no wi-fi on this plane. I’ve never flown JetBlue before. Live DirecTV is nice. How many episodes of House Hunters can I watch before we get to New York? Gee the sun is awfully bright. Should I have worn a different outfit? Is the teenage boy sitting in front of me farting into his seat?

8:51 AM: Land at JFK. Pee. Search for shuttle to Federal Circle stop because the AirTrain is not running to the airport #IRONY but at least it’s free. These assholes wearing hiking gear are super rude to the airport employee at the shuttle stop. I silently curse their luggage.

some time before 11:00 AM: Take J train to Canal Street. This used to be my train to school until my family moved to College Point, which is the pimple on the side of that Chinatown-in-Queens wonderland, Flushing. This train has everything: elderly Asian people, old school Puerto Ricans, Eastern European dames, dudes dressed up for Comic-Con.

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10:37 AM: Arrive Canal Street. Fight the hordes of tourists and residents heading east. Stop to take a picture of some lobsters.

11:00 AM: Arrive Elizabeth Street, where I find O & E and their brood. Street is full of people who also want to eat at Jing Fong.

11:05 AM: Get number from crabby woman with bad skin and holding a microphone. Though she yells numbers of other parties into the microphone, I’m not sure that her voice is actually being amplified through speakers.

11:30 AM: D arrives! Or was it M the expectant mother? We’re not sure when we’re eating so M and I go around the corner and get a box of roast pork bao to eat while we wait.

11:45 AM: We get to inside, up the long escalator to be met by a serious young woman holding a walkie talkie. She herds us over to a wall, where we stand until we are herded to a table by another serious young woman holding a walkie talkie.

11:55 AM: ALL OF THE EATING ALL OF THE TALKING ALL OF THE DIM SUM. I take awkward pictures of my friends. And no joke, there are White girls selling mimosas and glasses of juice like we were on “Sex and the City”. Since when are there cocktails at Jing Fong? The mimosa was fine and, most importantly, dirt cheap.

1:05 PM: Finish eating. E takes little S to a puppet show. M goes for a foot rub while the rest of us going to a park nearby where baby L can run around on the kind of concrete playground that looks like a total hazard but of course is the kind that I, D, and O grew up playing on and we all turned out okay.

2:15 PM: After a solid hour of swinging (baby L) and talking (grown-ups) and listening to different bands of elderly Chinese gentleman playing music, we meet M by the subway so we can go to her shower.

3:00 PM: HELLO BROOKLYN WHERE DID YOU PUT YOUR BODEGAS ARE THEY HIDING BEHIND THE VEGAN COFFEE SHOPS. We walk to the shower venue. So many grown-ups and only one baby apart from little L. I hug everybody I know, shake hands with those I don’t, and eat a lot of sandwiches.

5:00 PM: After two hours, I’ve made this charming thing:

Am I gonna get this through TSA?

Also! All of us wrote guesses for the baby’s name on a sheet of butcher paper. My guesses were Huckleberry, Beaver, and Raleigh. And just now as I type this, another guess would be Whistler, where M & C got married (aw).

5:30 PM: Start heading towards Tito Rad’s in Woodside to meet my brother and my friend K for dinner.

7:00 PM: LUMPIA PORK ADOBO CHICKEN ADOBO BISTEC. K looks awesome and so does P and I’m still in one piece thank goodness.

8:00 PM: Bid K goodnight. P walks me to the LIRR station at 61st Street, where I begin my journey back to JFK.

8:24 PM: While boarding train, I nearly get run over by two ladies whose look I can only describe as “Jersey Shore meets The Hangover” as they yank wheelie suitcases off and then back onto the train. Wave slowly and sadly at P while the train pulls away.

9:05 AM: Arrive JFK after LIRR/AirTrain/shuttle. Nobody is at TSA but I had been hustling so I was sweaty. But was this the usual “fat girl running through an airport” sweat? Was it the meat sweats from all the food? Or was it “I made this toy robot that I worry TSA may think is suspicious” sweat? In any case, TSA didn’t care about the robot though something in the vicinity of my crotch set off the body scanner so I had to go through twice.

9:15 PM: Start boarding. Pray nobody sits next to me so I can put up the armrest and really just sorta hunker down. Look out the window, see a gorgeous harvest moon for a few minutes until the plane turns towards the runway.

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9:45 PM: Take off. DirecTV. Seat next to mine is empty. I drink a coke and watch the Giants game.

11:15 PM: Am I treating myself to a cab back to my friend’s apartment? See taxi line – NOPE.

12:45 AM: I’m walking down my friend’s street. Though her neighborhood is pretty safe, I decide the best way to keep away would-be rapists is to play “Nightshift” by The Commodores as loudly as I can from my iPhone 6:

Gonna be some sweet sounds
Coming down on the nightshift
I bet you’re singing proud
Oh I bet you’ll pull a crowd
Gonna be a long night
It’s gonna be all right
On the nightshift
Oh you found another home
I know you’re not alone
On the nightshift

12:55 AM: Take the dog out. She refuses to pee because it’s too dark? Too windy? Too wet? She doesn’t like the neighbor’s Halloween decorations? I take out my contacts, wait for the dog to curl up next to my head, and try to get some sleep.

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May

• Bought my friend Dave a bootleg Darth Vader piñata from Dulcelandia for his birthday
• Went to New York to see the Charles James show at the Met, hung out in Sunnyside with friends eat massive green chile burgers and meet Sari’s adorable baby, go to a benefit, stay in fancy hotels
• Read in Carly and Rose’s first show

June

• Ran an alumni version of ScavHunt
• Hung out with Zeke the Cat
• Took a selfie that I like
• Flew to LA for V3Con, finally met Joz, ate the same meal at the same restaurant two days in a row
• Danced to house music with a bunch of other middle-aged people in Daley Plaza

July

• Spent July 4th weekend with Lola
• Said goodbye to Ellen who moved to Seattle
• Went on insulin
• Got a Fitbit
• Went to Pitchfork
• Walked home from the Loop, broke my feet (temporarily)

August

• Drank at The Cove for the first time in 15? 16? years
• Practically threw up when I saw my piece about the history of prom at my alma mater published in the school bulletin because I was nervous about it being horrible
• Was the first return reader for That’s All She Wrote Chicago
  • This was also my first live lit show to be held at a tattoo parlor
• Looked after all the cats in Chicago
• Hung out with Patrick who came for a visit
  • snorgled belugas
  • saw Robyn and Royskopp
  • ate at Hot Doug’s, probably for the last time
• Saw Funkadesi play Summerdance, and the experience had me thinking of what Stefon from SNL might say: “The hottest night in Chicago is the Funkadesi show in Grant Park. This show had everything: turbans, Brazilian drummers, bros doing Bollywood dance, white guys in dashikis.”
• Labor Day weekend
  • Cabaret at the Music Box
  • Art Institute with Toni, Magda, and Andrea to see the Magritte show and get all worked up over it
  • Lie around Leah’s, house-sitting and cat-sitting
  • Binge-watch second season of “Masters of Sex”

I am actually quite fat.

I’m fat pretty much everywhere, from the top of my big old Charlie Brown head to the bottoms of my Fred Flintstone feet. Fat everywhere except for two places.

Here, and here.

If I had to pick any two places on my body to be medium or even just a little undersized, it definitely would not have been in the tits.

But as a fat girl I thought, like other fat girls, that I actually had big tits.

I didn’t know my boobs were only sorta medium sized until a few years ago, when I was hanging out at home with a few friends. There were four of us, three women and a dude, my friend D.

D was looking around the room, peering at us while we smoked and flipped through fashion magazines, a look of glee on his face, and exclaimed that he was happy to be in a room of big breasted women. Considering D’’s favorite word was and always will be “Boobies!” I wasn’t surprised but it was still kind of weird.

The three of ladies looked at each other, shrugged, then told him to kindly shut the fuck up before resuming smoking cigarettes and reading fashion magazines.

But then I snuck an admiring peek at my chest, squeezed my tits together with arms, like they were high-fiving each other. I could almost hear them saying “I say old man, splendid going there!” “Thank you sir! Couldn’t have managed it without you!”

High fives all around.

But over time I’ve come to see that I’m not big breasted so much as I have enough body fat to sort of propel my tits up so that it looks like they’re bigger than they are. This wouldn’t be a problem except when it comes to bra shopping.

Even those “plus size” bras made for fat bitches like myself tend to think of a 42D as round, ample melons that are symbols of fertility and body positivity blah blah blah. A picture of a tattooed lady with dyed red hair and an hourglass figure tattooed with bluebirds and Mexican sugar skulls posing in a vintage-style bathing suit on ModCloth.com comes to mind.

But my boobs are shaped more like soufflés that didn’t rise quite right. They’re what a long-ago acquaintance would have described as “70’s boobs”, sorta bouncy if not super perky. They seem better suited for a disco era silk jersey Halston gown, a dress that I pray I could one day pull off without looking like a balloon covered with a dinner napkin.

I find myself trying not to pose too much in pictures but sitting is out because I tend to think I look like Jabba The Hutt only with much nicer boobs.

If the ideal breasts were the Hostess Snowballs that come two to a package, in various colors to match the season, then mine would be more like stale Ding Dongs you get from the day old bakery.

If the ideal breast were a perfect sphere of red jell-0, mine would be like the broken lumpy blocks of orange gelatin at this awful buffet on Belmont and Kimball that I can’t stop eating at.

Why do I keep talking about food when I talk about my breasts?

I’m not sure if it wouldn’t be to important to me to have big boobs if I wasn’t fat in the first place.

Like I think it would be rad if I could shift my fat around so I can have bigger boobs for, like, the length of a cocktail party, and then deflate them if I have to walk through Wrigleyville on a Saturday night.

And also maybe move some of that fat to my flat Asian ass so I wouldn’t be so uncomfortable sitting for more than a few hours at a time.

When I was in the fifth grade, certain books used to be passed around my classroom in secret. I went to a public school in New York City, and most of those places were terrible places in the 1980s. Ketchup was a vegetable, and we didn’t have a real music teacher, just a substitute whose lesson plan consisted of playing the Dirty Dancing soundtrack every day while we sang along. We had a library but we weren’t allowed to borrow any of the books.

One of the books that made it’s way around the room was Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. I think if you are a woman of a certain age such as myself, which is older than 30 and younger than, well, Judy Blume, you can’t really think about or talk about your boobs until you have talked about this book.

If you have not read this book, let me fill you in on what you missed while you were growing up in a cave or whatever.

Margaret is an only child who, at the age of eleven, moves from New York City to suburban New Jersey. Eager to make new friends, she forms a secret club, The Pre-Teen Sensations, which is literally the greatest name for a club anywhere any time in the history of pre-teens, boobs, young adult literature, and the world in general.

The club has rules, one of which is they have to wear a bra, something for which they check at every meeting. Every meeting is punctuated by an exercise, which consists of the girls pumping their arms back and forth, shouting:

I Must! I Must! I Must Increase My Bust!

I MUST! I MUST! I MUST INCREASE MY BUST!

The only exercise I’ve ever done throughout my life was this one, in the privacy of my bedroom or the bathroom when I was growing up. It never occurred to me to form my own version of the Pre-Teen Sensations when I was eleven. The other girls in my class kept their distance and anyway they seemed too busy with Chinese school to come to my house for quarter waters and furtive bust exercises in my crowded apartment.

I had a brief flirtation with floor hockey in high school. I sometimes think about doing free yoga in Millennium Park. But I prefer to sleep in, ideally after consuming many tacos in bed, and I believe that my body is an accurate reflection of that.

But the thrusting, the “musting” of my bust into existence, is a habit I cannot give up. Just like reading Judy Blume books in my room at night, or forming not-so-secret clubs of best friends, friends whose boobs come in all shapes and sizes. Like snowflakes. Or animal crackers

I know the exercises probably had nothing to do with the tits I have today. What I got has as much to do with genetics as much as the precisely engineered bras from a variety of French, Belgian, and German manufacturers that I enjoy buying and wearing today. But the thrusting, it’s fun, it’s hilarious, and a reminder that taking care of my body and caring for myself can take many forms.

Back straight.

Chest out.

Arms bent.

Deep breath… and go.

I Must! I Must! I Must Increase My Bust!

This essay is as written for Miss Spoken, a Chicago live lit series co-founded and co-produced by Carly Oishi and Rosamund Lannin, on Wednesday, May 28, 2014 at The Gallery Cabaret.