It’s funny how nicknames evolve. From my husband, my name has evolved from Sarah to Soup to Wiffles and all manner of things in between, with reasons ranging from the simple phonetic evolution of one sound into another to an inside joke becoming a moniker that sticks.

However, starting shortly after I turned 19, my nicknames seemed to be following a more consistent pattern: Sad Sarah, Weepy-Eyed Lady of the Wetlands, or simply That Girl Who Doesn’t Come to Class Anymore. In the span of two years, my first college roommate and former best friend committed suicide, my mother died, I spent a period of time in the hospital with a life-threatening illness, my close friend was murdered, and my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

People on my tiny college campus who hadn’t known my name or face in the years I’d spent sharing classrooms and sexual partners with them somehow suddenly became well acquainted with the ins and outs of my personal life and my continuing bouts with earth-shattering grief.

And then a funny thing happened: people started coming out of the woodwork to tell me their stories. In my mind, Our Lady of Perpetual Agony was a far superior title to hold than “Sarah who’s not really pulling off those culottes,” so I was happy to oblige those who wanted me to anoint their heads with my tears.

People whose names I hardly knew were hugging me in hallways, acquaintances were leaving me cookies, and even professors were crying in front of me and revealing intimate details of their lives. I once found my face buried in the abundant, mole-covered bosom of a particularly icy professor as she described the death of her close college friend. I found myself feeling sorry for her and wondering how soon I could remove my head from her chest.

And then an even stranger thing started happening: some of the sad people didn’t just want me to hold them with my arms. They wanted me to hold them with my vagina too.

The first incident occurred shortly after I came back from a short stay in the hospital and a very nice boy I was vaguely aware of decided that I was the right person to confess his sins to. The day I returned to campus, he asked me to take a walk with him and started to unload his past battles with substance abuse and his conflicted with relationship with a sick family member. As the tears began to stream down his face, his hand moved to my knee, and his mouth moved toward mine. I politely declined his offer, giving him a good shoulder squeeze and suggesting we make the move back inside.

Had he checked my MySpace, as folks were wont to do in those days, he could have found out my list of turn-ons were pretty much the same as any teenager: people old enough to buy me Boone’s Farm, guys who owned copies of Jeff Buckley’s “Grace,” and car crashes. That list still hasn’t been amended to include “sad stories about the triumph of the human spirit.”

Since then, I’ve had others crawl out of the woodwork who’ve tried the same old sad-to-sex routine on me, to no avail. Next there was the filmmaker, who parlayed his stories about his father’s cancer into offers of money, cross-country trips, and the promise of leaving his fiancé for sexual encounters with his newfound confidante. There was the former high school acquaintance who tried to turn his tearful stories of awkwardness into a make-out session, and then, the exes and one-n

ight stands crawling out of the woodwork with drunken texts and Gchats as soon as I announced my engagement, trying to convince me of our MFEO status.

Now, I understand the impulse to fuck when sad. I’ve had more than my fair share of depressed sex. I once turned a hard cry in a bathtub over my feral cat’s death into a full-blown shower sex session, but we were already going to have sex in that tub. That’s why we were in the tub. That was my sex tub. A few months after my mother’s death, I almost told a former teenage hookup that I was in love with him at the Gay Pride Parade until I was mercifully interrupted by a girl returning with cans of Sparks. He later brought Sparks Girl to a party and ended up leaving her on a boat. Needless to say, it wouldn’t have worked out.

Seriously, dudes, I’m all for romantic gestures, and I am no way opposed to male crying. Give me roses, presents, maybe even a well-timed cover of “Lover, You Should Have Come Over” with a misty eye, but please, don’t try to use your tears as lube. Let’s do some emotionally-stable fucking in a bed or a car or all those places Ludacris likes to bang, but if my snotty, mascara-covered face and obviously troubled state isn’t getting you there, please be assured that while your waterlogged beard looks sweet, we’d be better off waiting.

Follow Sarah on Twitter: @SarahGCrow.

Like any New Yorker with parents who cared enough to spend money, rather than time, on their child’s problems, I’ve been in therapy for a really, really long time.

For the past few years, after my father died following a long battle with cancer and I stopped juggling a full-time job and grad school, I finally found my chronic anxiety at a manageable level for one of the first times in as long as I could remember. Finding myself suffering from some less-than-pleasant side effects from my anti-depressant regimen and with my anxiety well-managed by talk therapy alone, my therapist and I decided that it was as good a time as any for me to see what life without pills was like.

Things went well at first, but after a little over a year off my medication, the stress of a move, wedding planning and an in increase in freelance hustling to pay the bills threw my brain into unprecedented levels of turmoil and I found myself pulling over to the side of the road to hyperventilate every time someone passed too close to my car or “Flagpole Sitta” came on the radio.

So I asked for a referral from my new therapist and made an appointment with a new psychiatrist to see if we could work on quieting the thoughts telling me that my work would never end and the associated need for release that kept telling me to stock up on Prada raincoats and try to jump on stage at Chris Brown concerts.

When I arrived at my new doctor’s office, I instantly felt something was amiss. Upon entering, I was greeted by the jarring sound of a cowbell clanging against the entryway door. Gone were the comfortable couches, stacks of magazines and white noise machines I had come to expect from waiting rooms.

She had instead opted for a park bench, dim fluorescent lighting, and a collection of signs bearing expressions like, “The key to a closed door is an open mind,” and, “The best ships are friendships.”

However, I was I was there to get better, not to choose an interior decorator, so I could let her design quirks slide. When we began the consultation, I explained to her that managing my near-crippling anxiety was my only concern, and that I was willing to take any approach necessary, whether it come through medication or therapy alone.

As she thumbed through my chart, she asked me about the medications I had taken previously and what I had liked or disliked about each of them. In the long list of pills I’ve tried to get my crazy sorted, I casually mentioned one that had caused me to gain weight.

“I’d prefer not to try that one again,” I added.

As soon as I said this, her eyes lit up.

“Has anyone ever diagnosed you as super-rapid cycling bipolar?” she asked me, seeming suddenly energized. In the nearly 15 years I’ve been in therapy, nobody has ever diagnosed me as bipolar before. In fact, nobody has ever so much as suggested it.

“To me, your behavior isn’t textbook bipolar, but there’s a great medicine, Topamax, which will regulate some of your anxiety and best of all, will help get some of that weight off.”

I sat there shocked, trying hard to collect my lower jaw from my lap, as I pondered whether or not to storm out of her office. Sure, I could stand to lose a few pounds, but I could also stand to do pretty much anything else I please with my time, and if I wanted to go to a professional regarding the amount of jiggle I’m packin’, I would have chosen a trainer or nutritionist, not a psychiatrist.

But then, somewhere in the back of my mind, a voice whispered to me, “Sarah, you’ve hit the jackpot.”

So I took the prescription. Some dark little part of me that I thought was dead and buried stuck its shriveled little hand out of the grave that day and said, “You’re not hating yourself enough these days.”

I spent years and years of my life believing that, regardless of whatever else I would accomplish in my life, my thinness and other standards of conventional attractiveness would still be the measures I would be judged for by the rest of the world, and my little visit to the doctor reminded me that maybe I’m not the only one who thinks that way.

Even when my mother was wasting away from chemotherapy, half of our conversations still centered around how excited she was to be buying smaller sizes.

For whatever reason, when I think back to the period of time in my life when I was at my thinnest, I see the world through rose-colored glasses. In fact, my life at the time was a mess –- I was doing poorly in school, my mother was dying, I slept with guys who smelled like Goodwill and called me “brah” during sex, I lied about having food sensitivities so I wouldn’t have to eat with other people, and eventually, I found myself hospitalized and losing 3 feet of intestine, which, as it turns out, I would come to miss. The only thing I was better at was being thin.

Yet somehow, despite my regular therapist’s suggestion that I get a second opinion and despite knowing that this new doctor, who has subsequently, without prompting, offered me a prescription for an anti-convulsive with weight-loss properties, is most certainly a quack, I can’t imagine myself giving up an express ticket back to Tinyville, now that I’m already seeing it work.

So, xoJaners, any tips on getting un-thinspired?

Follow Sarah on Twitter at @SarahGCrow.

Join us for the American Horror Story Late Show on Spreecast!

For those of you who don’t know me: Hello. My name is Sarah, and I am disastrous person.

Starting from an early age, I decided that the ridiculous ideas put forth by my mother and society as a whole, like occasionally brushing my hair and trying not to smell like low tide, simply did not apply to the free-spirited life I was trying to build for myself.

“Nobody will care how clean my face is when I’m Manhattan’s most famous neurosurgeon/puppeteer,” I laughed maniacally, dribbling fruit punch down the front of my white shirt. My priorities as a youth were limited to sleeping 14 hours a day, destroying my braces with Laffy Taffy, and getting Ethan Embry to ask me on a date.

While in my adult life, I have come to appreciate the finer things, like fancy purses and washing behind my ears, I still bear the visible marks of a laissez-faire childhood, from my routinely singed eyebrows to the superglue that is going to make this bra a nightmare to get off tonight.

But don’t worry; while I was busy trying to cover this chemical burn on my eyelid, I also came up with a very handy list for MacGyvering all the nice things you’ve set on fire:

So You Ripped Your Nail In Half Opening a Can of Four Loko Right After Getting a Manicure: 

As a woman with a relatively large number of lady-friends, I am often the recipient of texts that include words like “mani-pedi,” “paraffin dip” and “vodka tampon.” The latter aside, I am constantly forced to decline these kind offers of hand massages and cuticle-jabbing, as I cannot, for the life of me, go more than 12 minutes before ruining a manicure.

That said, for special occasions, namely when people get me gift certificates I can’t return, I will occasionally find myself in a salon chair listening to a Muzak version of “Lady in Red” and counting down the seconds until I smear wet nail polish on something or, more likely, rip my nail in half.

I now travel to the salon with two essential things: a tube of perma-hold glue and some clear nail polish. While gluing your nails to your own skin may sound like the beginning of a straight-to-video Paris Hilton horror movie, it is also the first step in your temporarily fixed manicure. Use a tiny bit of the glue to put the pieces of your nail back together and to hold the nail polish down. Once that’s done, add a swipe of clear polish over the seam, and voila!

So Your Ripped Nail Tore a Hole In Your Stockings, It’s Creeping Dangerously Close To Your Crotch and You Never Remember to Cross Your Legs: 

As a person with abnormally jagged fingernails who routinely finds herself in places where metal scraps and loose nails are abundant, I tear more underpinnings than James Dean, the bulk of which are my beloved stockings. Fortunately, I have come to find that the dreaded clear nail polish trick, which looks terrible and feels worse, is not the only solution to a run in stockings.

I don’t know if this is true for everyone, but as a child with a similarly clumsy mother, Stitch Witchery was as ubiquitous in my home as kitchen fires and mustard stains. Simply place it on the inside of the tights, run it under the hot air dryer (for hands only, my ass), and you’re good as new, with a pair of creepily warm stockings in tow.

So You Scratched the Hell Out Of Your Leather Purse and Now You’re Crying:

In my entire life, I have managed to maintain only two collections: novelty spoons and purses, the latter of which I have consistently messed up with free pens from the bank, lipsticks and any sharp object I have ever found myself in possession of. Fortunately, I am also in possession of the greatest and grossest leather repair tool of all time: my oily face.

Sure, this is why I’m not allowed at any Coach store in the greater New York metropolitan area, but rubbing your face on scratched leather is absolutely the best way to make it look shiny and new. Even leather experts will tell you that the oils in your hands can take care of some of the minor damage inflicted by everyday wear and tear and, if your pores are anything like mine, they’re a veritable goldmine of scratch-remover. If you’re cursed with poreless, matte skin, I know a redhead with a pretty open schedule and overactive sebaceous glands who is dying to bury her face in your Gucci.

So You Threw Something That Shouldn’t Be Dried In the Dryer and Now It’s On Fire:This may seem unrelated, but please bear with me: I need to make a public service announcement about so-called “eyebrow razors.” I’m sure there may be some people out there who do truly use these little magic wands to trim their eyebrows, but, like people who are willing to admit that they like getting peed on, I’ve never met them. Let’s get real about products with names like “Finishing Touch” and “Velvet Biscuit.” These things are for trimming pubic hair, and they’re awesome at their job.

A lesser-known use for these amazing little gizmos is fixing the clothes you’ve ruined. If you have not yet figured this out the hard way, like I did after Jane’s recent piece reignited my near-paralyzing fear of bedbugs, fake fur is mostly plastic, and will absolutely set on fire if you so much as think about putting it near a dryer.

But fear not: your handy “Pearl Alley” or “Pink and Pretty” eyebrow razor can fix that faster than you can say “landing strip.” First, brush the matted fur with a good, sturdy wire or firm bristle hairbrush to remove any fur clumps that might have formed. Once it’s no longer a tangled mess, remove the shave guide from the razor and go to town shaving off all the newly blackened parts of the fur. In just a few minutes, whatever it is you ruined will be good as new, and you’ll once again have a faux fur that’s just as smooth as a freshly shaved mons pubis.

xoJaners: What disasters befall you regularly?

Follow Sarah on Twitter at @SarahGCrow.

Two fingers, no consequences.

Nobody loves the New York Subway system. The trains in New York are like a bad ex you can’t shake: they’re hot, dirty, and there are always too many other people riding them. I spent my childhood in fear of the lurching, vomited-upon trains that perpetually lost power in the tunnels, but like the chauffeurless commoner that I am, I found myself lured back time and time again by her siren song.

On one hot summer night a few years back, my close female friend and I grew tired of watching Ludacris videos on my bed and decided, being the danger-seekers we were, to venture downtown to meet a friend. We boarded the nearly deserted Subway near my home and found ourselves seats in an empty car, talking about our plans for the evening and our excitement about heading back to school later that month.

After a few minutes in the car together, a man in his early 20s boarded. We took little note of him until, without warning, he took the seat right next to me. He didn’t say a word or even glance in our direction, but there he was, with his khakis pressed against my thigh as the train chugged through the tunnel.

Nervous, I squeezed my friend’s hand, coaxing her out of the seat and toward the door. While the stranger had done nothing wrong other than commit a little personal space invasion, I was uneasy enough to know that I wanted to be far away from him, and fast. Once we had exited the car, we let the stranger pass us in the station while I pulled my friend aside. We decided to take separate stairwells out of the station, in case the man might mug us. At the very least, we agreed, we would still be able to get home, and maybe even still have a decent time, with only one wallet and one phone.

My friend took the stairs first, and when I could no longer hear her footsteps, I headed across the empty station toward another stairwell. The stranger was no longer in sight, and I began my ascent, confident about our choice to split up, and thinking about all the Andre I would be buying in mere moments.

As I reached the first landing, I suddenly felt the cold tile wall against my face as a surge of pain rushed through my head. While I tried to steady myself, I began to notice the warmth of another body against mine and the smell of cigarettes. As I turned my head, I saw the stranger, pushing me up against the wall, his lip caressing my ear as his sweaty face slid across my cheek.

Before I could scream, his arm was against my throat and I found myself gasping for breaths of the hot, exhaust-filled air. I was growing lightheaded when I felt my skirt move up my thighs and, in seconds, his fingers enter me. In the moment, the unwanted penetration was the least of my worries. Did he have a knife, I wondered? Was he going to kill me? Without further thought, I used my remaining strength to push him off me hard and ran, screaming bloody murder, up the stairs.

My friend, who saw me run screaming from the stairwell, followed me into the first doorman building we saw, where we called the police. As we looked through the glass doors of the lobby, we noticed a familiar face. The stranger had followed us and was staring at us from outside. When the lights of the police car became visible from around the corner, the stranger gave us one last look and leisurely walked off into the night, like a man who hadn’t spent the last 5 minutes trying to rape a stranger in a public stairwell.

When the police got out of their car, I felt instantly relieved. The officers, one male, one female, were young and kind looking, and I was certain they would Benson and Stabler the shit out that asshole. They immediately started asking a series of seemingly irrelevant questions as I implored them to walk down the street and arrest the man, who couldn’t have been more than a hundred yards away at that point.

Lady Cop: What were you guys doing on the train?

Me: Going to meet a friend. (Being the stupid lady idiots that we are, we thought we could go out at night!)

Lady Cop: Is this friend male or female?

Me: Male. (Because I’m a slut like that.)

Lady Cop: And is this your boyfriend?

Me: No. (Just one of the many guys I have the slutty gall to talk to.)

Lady Cop: And what happened with the gentleman in the stairwell?

Me: He pushed me against the wall, choked me with his forearm, and stuck his fingers in my vagina. (But he was such a gentleman about it.)

Lady Cop: So what did this guy look like?

Me: Light skin, light hair in braids, a backwards blue Yankee cap, khaki shorts, a white tank top, red Nike high tops.

Lady Cop: And what race was he?

Me: Hispanic, I think.

At this point, my would-be Mariska put down her pen and looked at her partner. He shook his head. “That’s what every guy we’re looking for out here tonight looks like, miss,” she laughed. Her partner chuckled. “Frankly, there’s nothing we can do.” My eyes were wide with disbelief as I saw her fold up the paper she had been writing on and open the passenger door of the car. “And my suggestion?” she offered. “If you have the cash, take a cab home.” And like that, they were gone, off to not do their job somewhere else.

This is the kind of boogeyman sexual assault story victim blamers love to cite as an example of a “clear-cut” attack, the terrible, unconscionable capital-letter Sexual Assault that bad scary criminals do to nice girls from good families. This man was a stranger. I wasn’t drunk. I wasn’t somewhere I “should have had the good sense not to be.” He overpowered me. I screamed, I ran, I called the cops. I did everything every self-defense class, every cop who visited my middle school, and every “Law & Order,” told me to do, and still nothing was done. There is probably a video of my assault somewhere, or at least, there probably was at one time. There are probably videos from the apartment building of the stranger standing outside. And nothing was done.

I’m not writing this article to paint a portrait of myself as a victim or gain sympathy for my experience. I am not doing this to remind anyone that there are inherent bad people in this world who will do bad things. I am not trying to speak for someone else’s experience. What I am trying to do is provide one answer to those who ask, “If it didn’t go to trial, how can we call him a predator?” “If it was really assault, why wouldn’t she get the cops involved?” Because, for some of us, nothing is done.

When someone tried, unsuccessfully, to steal my friend’s iPhone last year, they were driven around by cops for hours until the wannabe thief was found. When a stranger tried to rape me, I was told to take cabs in the future.

When I was 25 years old, I gave birth to a set of twins. However, unlike the fat little cherubs who become the target of strangers’ coos and kisses, these puppies were strapped to my chest and I quickly realized that, much to my chagrin, the girls were fraternal.

Let me back up. While many girls pray for the day when they become women, I found myself thanking God that I was, mercifully, a late to non-bloomer. Thanks to a combination of disordered eating, illness and a self-designed workout routine that relied heavily on chest presses, I managed to keep my secondary sex characteristics on the DL for the better part of a decade, allowing me to remain breastless and braless well into my 20s.

After years of torturing myself into Limited Too tank tops, I came to the realization (with the help of some serious therapy, one too many trips to the hospital, and some very helpful antidepressants) that life was too short and croissants were too delicious for me to spend one more day depriving myself. 

So I ordered a turkey sandwich. And the next day, I had a latte. And the next day, I ate a banana for the first time in 6 years. While my calorie intake was far from Phelpsian, my sad, furious little body held onto every spoonful of cereal like another meal might never come my way, and, in what seemed like the blink of an eye, I packed 40 soft, jiggly pounds onto my 5’4″ frame. 

When my breasts first appeared, I treated them in much the same way that I might treat a horn I had grown in my sleep. I held them, stared at them, and constantly checked in on them to make certain they hadn’t disappeared. While my right breast had developed into a full, rounded, cleavable C cup, the other girl had obviously reaped fewer benefits from my newfound joie de feed. My left breast had, in what I can only imagine was a nod to its profound sadness at its stunted growth, grown into a pert little teardrop-shaped mound, sitting inches higher than her partner. I can say with complete honesty that it was the only time in my life I’ve been less than thrilled to receive a B.

It stood to reason that, much the slight differences in the size of my hands and feet, there would be some difference in the size of my breasts, but nobody’s ever stared at my hands when I’m having a conversation with them, and my fiance’s not in the habit of motorboating my feet.

While my new breasts have never been the object of scorn or derision, thanks in part to my “If you don’t like my body, I’ll put my clothes back on and excuse myself from this art class/office/Chuck E Cheese” policy, they haven’t gone unnoticed by my sexual partners. One such companion joked, “It’s cool that they’re different. It’s like getting to be with two girls at once,” but for the most part, the response to my boobs has been, “OM NOM NOM NOM.”

Dressing mismatched bazooms has proved more of a challenge any time I’m not wearing a sportsbra, skintight halter top, or incredibly confusing combination of the two. While I don’t go into dressing rooms screaming, “I am asymmetrical, hear me roar,” I’ve often incorrectly assumed that female salespeople might have encountered this problem in the past. When trying on wedding dresses, the otherwise lovely saleswoman found just how futile trying to get my girls to meet in the middle can be. While pouring myself into a dress, she kept chanting, “Lift that one higher! Higher! HIGHER!” While I’d love breasts that I could conveniently tuck under my chin when not in use, I had to explain that it simply wasn’t going to happen.

However, with the aid of the Internet and a few dollars, I found a few ways to make Biggie and Tupac finally get together and see eye-to-eye. 

Like a set of Jell-O Jigglers for your rack.

Braza Silicone Dolly Super Wedge Push Up Bra Inserts

In 6th grade, I remember looking on in confusion as one of my classmates entered our classroom having grown enormous breasts over summer vacation. My friends and I, too young to fully appreciate the mechanics that led to such a staggering development, would discuss how this could have possibly happened and ponder how and when our bodies would follow suit. The only thing we could all agree upon was that we would never stuff our bras, for fear of being found out as cheaty little liars.

While I might not wear a fake ass or bra inserts on a date where I’m confident someone’s going to see me naked for the first time, I have fully embraced the fake it ’til you make it strategy when it comes to feeling good about myself on a day-to-day basis. My hair isn’t naturally straight, my skin isn’t naturally tan, and my boobs only look like perfectly round little melons when I’ve stuffed one or two of these wobbly little guys into my bra. If I’m not apologizing for my near-daily eschewal of cute underwear in favor of nipple-high ultra Spanx, I’m sure not going to apologize for being a grown-ass lady who stuffs her bra.

Gap Body Convertible Wireless Bra

There you are, cleavage, you elusive bitch.

Why are we as a society not having an open dialogue about the many wonders of the racerback bra? In my never-ending quest to fake the appearance of a perfectly symmetrical chest, I have found no greater ally than the Gap’s wireless bras. These over-the-shoulder boulder holders have adjustable straps, meaning you can alter them for pretty much any garment you might be wearing, including, but not limited to: T-shirts, jumpsuits, overalls with no shirt underneath, those confusing dresses where it looks like someone ripped off one of the sleeves but it turns out that’s just a thing these days, and a slave Leia outfit. Securing your bra on the tightest hook, adjust the strap on the smaller of those puppies all the way up, lean forward, and voila! Instant cleavage.

Body Drench Quick Tan Spray

I smell like a bear claw!

My motto for the last ten minutes since I thought of it has always been, “When in doubt, spray it out.” I’m a huge proponent of Downy wrinkle release spray when I’m too lazy to iron something, dry shampoo when I’m too lazy to wash my hair, and a spray tan when I’m trying to cover up my shockingly translucent skin.

While you can always get this professionally done for about $60, I’m always on the lookout for cheaper alternatives to beauty treatments that don’t require me baring my goods to total strangers. With just a hint of sunless tanner applied around the top of your breasts and between them with a makeup sponge, you can easily enhance what your mama gave you. I’m partial to Quick Tan’s version because it’s not streaky, it doesn’t give you the beta carotene OD color that a lot of other sunless tanners do, and, perhaps best of all, it makes you smell like you a Krispy Kreme. 

What are your other tips for making the most of a mismatched pair?

“Well, she was a smoker when she was younger,” my grandmother said to me during one of our infrequent phone calls, only shortly after my mother had been admitted to the hospital for what would become her final visit.

Sure, just like me, and like millions of other people who live their lives to ripe old ages, my mother had once been a smoker. She also still had an AOL email address, drove like a maniac, and pronounced “burrito” weird, but, in discussions about her impending death, her collegiate nicotine habit didn’t seem much more relevant than any of those other details. She was dying, there wasn’t anything we could do about it, but even those who loved her most were still trying to find somewhere to place the blame.

Even among groups of logical, generally compassionate people, when talking about death or serious illness, there often seems to be a desperate need to play Web MD with the reasons behind the disease, and decide which precautions to take to ensure our own future safety when navigating the world of the sick. Even in my own life, after having people insinuate that my punctured intestine may have been the result of overly vigorous anal sex or an eating disorder, I still find myself, a person whose first line of defense against an unwashed cut is licking it and has tried to cure food poisoning with whiskey, still often feigning expertise when it comes to other peoples’ medical problems. Skin cancer? Should have reapplied your sunscreen more often. Herpes? Should have worn a Hazmat suit like everyone else! Diabetes? Don’t care what kind! Shame, fatty, shaaaaaaame!

The Lung Cancer Alliance’s recent “No One Deserves to Die” campaign has been playing on just these ideas with tongue-in-cheek advertising that’s popped up recently in a number of major U.S. cities. The ads, which bear inflammatory slogans including, “Hipsters Deserve to Die” and “Cat Lovers Deserve to Die,” have garnered some major media attention as part of the group’s larger mission to destigmatize lung cancer, which many still see as a disease based on personal fault.

Much like other diseases that many people mistakenly pass off as the end result of an individual’s weak will in the face of overwhelming vice, lung cancer is often treated with an attitude that blames the sick, rather than treating them with the compassion they deserve.

Just last week, a well-intentioned friend of mine, who works as a health blogger, wrote a post about a family member who was newly in remission from lung cancer. While much of the post explained her gratitude for her relative’s current good health, it still contained much of the rhetoric the Lung Cancer Alliance, and most sick people who just don’t want to be blamed for every bad decision they may have made, strive to combat. Her relative hadn’t smoked a cigarette! He rarely even microwaved his food! He ate organic meat! In her eyes, he didn’t deserve to die, and because he took precautions against it, he didn’t.

This is my mom:

She was weird and she smoked and she didn’t always know her right from her left and she ate her food with chopsticks and she didn’t deserve to die.

For the first 16 years of my life, I spent almost all of my time with one type of person: really mean girls.

From my own dear mother to my classmates at school, I found myself being thrown headfirst to the she-wolves at every turn. I was first indoctrinated in to the culture of cruelty at a young age, encountering my first tormenter at the tender age of 2. After being locked in a box by two larger girls, who sat on top, chanting, “You’ll never see your parents again,” I realized that there were two types of people in the world: the box-sitters and their captives, and that I was, undeniably, a member of latter.

In my strict, all-girls school, the problem continued. In first grade, I was informed I would never be able to perform “I Will Always Love You” like Whitney Houston by a girl who would, many years later, after spending months trying to sleep with my boyfriend, call me a “fat cunt” when I refused to let her come to my mother’s apartment on a Wednesday evening to vomit up her Bacardi Breezers.

In second grade, Emily M., a very tall, angry child, would delight daily in pulling me by my ankles off the monkey bars. In third grade, my music teacher called me a “horrible turd,” and in fifth, my history teacher told my class we were going to hell for discussing our essay tests with another class.

At home, I would often hear my mother, a magazine editor, vividly characterize her female colleagues with descriptions like, “She has the worst skin I’ve ever seen on someone who wasn’t going through puberty,” or, “a body like an apple on toothpicks.”

While I wish I could say that I completely eschewed any such behavior, I, too, was guilty of girl-on-girl hate speak for a brief period of my life when I was working out compulsively, watching “Sex and the City” like it was my job, and wearing a handkerchief as a shirt. Needless to say, I had problems, but, much like the scarves I had taken to tying around my then-breastless chest, I grew out of them.

It wasn’t until college that I realized I had a choice in whom I could be friends with and who I could deliberately avoid. The girl in my hall who dresses like a fairy on ecstasy and always wants to go on nature walks? Sure, she seems nice enough. The guy who tells me, apropos of nothing, that my dark eyeliner must mean I’m a “nasty girl” and mentions that my short body might prove a snug fit for his Brobdingnagian wang? Not so much.

I could finally say goodbye to women who tried to sit on my boyfriends’ laps at parties and men who talked about their sexual conquests’ “thunder thighs.” But without the social hierarchy, I suddenly felt lost.

For many people with self-esteem problems, there is comfort in the status quo. Knowing whether you’re the oppressor or the oppressed has some ass-backward security in it, and once I had banished all the assholes from my life, I realized it was something I strangely craved. So, like the self-hating genius I am, I found another way to get my fix.

Rather than exposing myself to bullies by walking past middle schools in booty shorts or asking celebrities to date me through Internet videos, I turned to one of the few things that never lets me down: TV.

While my life was suddenly lacking the strong, cruel women I had come to hate and admire, my television set overflowed with them. From the countless drink-throwing, weave-pulling incarnations of the Real Housewives to the brides crying over salmon mousse and armpit fat on “Bridezillas,” I finally found a way to stay close to the bitches I loved while maintaining a safe distance.

I don’t know why I can’t escape the warm light of a raging cunt’s glare. Something inside me likes rules — on the road, in bed, when it comes to who gets the last pair of Spanx on Gilt Groupe — and I’m not ashamed to say that there’s something about the indentured servitude I once blindly accepted at the feet of Juicy-clad Upper East Siders that I still want, to some degree.

These days, with my self-esteem slightly less trod on than a decade ago, I want to see the mean girls fail. I want Skinnygirl cocktails gunking up their extensions. I want their former sorority sisters to puke at their handbag launches. I want them to brunch all day in their sundresses in counties named after fruit salad components and keep high school alive … far, far away from here.

“Look at this stuff, isn’t it neat? Wouldn’t you think my collection’s complete? Wouldn’t you think I’m the girl, the girl who has everything?”

Much like patrons at a Chinese restaurant will tack on, “in bed!” to the end of their fortune cookie message, when I hear my fellow flame-haired hoarder sing those words, I can’t help but add, “in my vagina.”

On any given day, my cave of forgotten dreams is home to a plethora of fun little trinkets, like a furry little gift bag full of candy your mom won’t let you eat. Whether it’s that time of the month of that time of the evening when I’m feeling relaxed enough to write a piece on all of the wonders my love cavern holds, you can bet I’m packin’.

The DivaCup

Let me preface this by saying I am not into menstrual blood. I don’t like it, talk about it, or want it to sit at my lunch table. Despite my feelings about my little red nemesis, I have embraced the DivaCup.

Many years ago, an environmentally conscious friend of mine informed me that she was no longer using tampons. While my better judgment told me not to engage, in an effort to be polite, I responded, “Do go on! Tell me about what is in your vagina instead!” It was on this fateful day that I learned about the DivaCup, and I have never looked back. The cup is no bigger around than a silver dollar, and suctions beautifully into your snatch with just a slight twisting motion.

While I’m not, and may never be a woman who wants to paint the town red (intentional — see what I did there?) upon the onset of my ladytide, I am happy to never have to spend a week throwing out blood-soaked reminders that I am not a mom. Also, it comes in a cute carrying case, and who doesn’t like accessorizing things that will end up covered in your uterine lining?

ParaGard

A pretty scary thing to look at, but not as scary as an unwanted baby’s face!

My relationship with ParaGard, like my relationships with anything that spends a considerable amount of time in my nether regions, is complicated. Prior to having my IUD put in, I had been taking various birth control pills for over a decade and had grown tired of my boobs feeling like anvils strapped to my chest. In addition to making my body feel weird, I also had the unlucky Pill side effect of getting chased around the month by my period, like Pac Man trying to outrun icky little blood-covered ghosts, never entirely sure when they might strike.

Before getting the IUD inserted, which, at least in my case, involved an angry German doctor and a med student arguing over the degree to which my cervix was tipped, culminating in what felt like a kick to the cervix. But hey, I would never have to set a birth control alarm again! When I tell people about my current, preferred form of birth control, I find that they are often surprised, having been told, as I was, that women without children would not be able to get an IUD.

My very cool gynecologist, whose waiting room is full of gossip magazines and a TV that’s always playing “Iron Man,” explained the following to me: for many generations, the IUD was placed off-limits by doctors for women who hadn’t had children because of the risks the device can pose. If a woman contracts an STD with an IUD in place, there is a possibility that she will become sterile.

To mediate this risk, many doctors would tell patients that they could only get one if they already had children, assuming that this would be a good indicator that they were in monogamous relationship, and thus less likely to contract an STD, and wouldn’t be super-bummed if they were no longer able to pop out babies.

If you’re a person who isn’t awesome at doing something at the same time every day, the IUD, which goes in once and lasts up to 10 years, is pretty fucking amazing. However, if you’re a person trying to outsmart your period, a non-hormonal IUD can be a big bag of suck. Every month, my period behaves like a bloody demon that someone is trying to exorcise through my vagina. People have needed transfusions after losing less blood than this. Despite my mega-menses, this has been the best decision I’ve made since switching from Blackberry to iPhone.

The We-Vibe

My vagina is like a greedy child: it wants toys, it wants all of them, and it wants them now. As a teen, I visited nearly every sex store in the New York metropolitan area trying to discover what would tickle my fancy in ways that my perpetually stoned boyfriend didn’t.

As a teen in the late ’90s and early 2000s, I was heavily influenced by pretty much anything done on “Sex and the City” and, as such, became a devotee of the Rabbit, whose powers I still rely on today. However, it wasn’t until I was in my mid-20s and looking for something that I could use while having sex with someone other than myself, that I found my true vibrator soul mate.

The We-Vibe is meant to be used either on its own or during intercourse, but, unlike many other gadgets that rely on leg straps and force your partner to attempt penetration around a five inch vibrating badger humming on your goods, the We-Vibe lives inside of your vagina. But how, you ask, will I ever be able to get other stuff in there with this purple dude occupying my snatch? It may seem daunting at first, but I assure you, if that hole can push out a human skull, it can accommodate both a penis and this little guy.

While the inside part pushes on your G-spot, the outer part vibrates on your clitoris and, most importantly, doesn’t get in the way or rub the skin off your vagina. Also, since it requires no batteries, you can plug it in right next to your iPod dock for a neat conversation starter at parties.

Enough about my pussy! What are your favorite vagina contraptions?