Nutella is disgusting.

Now, I realize I might come under fire for daring to critique Nutella, nectar of the gods, the milk and honey bestowed upon us by a gracious Lord to spread upon our Wonder Bread (for lo, it is wondrous indeed). But I'm just going to take a stand right here and now, and say what everyone knows to be absolutely true: Nutella is freaking disgusting.

For those of you who are lightly confused and bewildered because you are unfamiliar with Nutella because you are American, I'll tell you that it's the gross chemically hazelnut-chocolate spread that your grandmother might spread on her whole wheat toast in the morning, depending on where your grandpa was stationed during World War 2. My grandpa was stationed mostly in Africa, therefore Nutella was not a staple food item in my grandma's kitchen. He did mail a leopard back to my grandma from Africa, but no Nutella.

A brief aside: my grandfather mailed a leopard to my grandma during World War 2. That story goes like this: my grandpa was in Africa during World War 2 for some reason and heard about a leopard that was terrorizing a village. It ate a small boy, so my grandpa shot it and mailed it back to my grandma. I like to imagine that he shipped the corpse of a jungle cat to my grandma without any forewarning, with a thousand and one blood-smeared stamps through 1940s mail (when you could ship exotic animal corpses, no problem. Picture two 1940s mailroom clerks in suspenders with their sleeves rolled up smoking cigarettes and wearing cabbie hats. "Say, Jiminy, this giant heavy package is leaking... leaking blood!" "Well, Amory Blane, just throw some of that new-fangled cel-lo-phane 'round it and send it on its way! This is the Postal Service, for Christ's sake, our packages can't be late because of a little guts and gore, now can they?"), so that one day she just opened up a package from her husband overseas and had the gory, bloody, fanged open mouth of a leopard staring up at her with rotting dead eyes. I then like to imagine my grandma rolling her eyes and throwing it up on a wall in the basement where no one could see it, and taking it out every once in a while to hang it on the wash line and beat the dust out of it, sighing over her cockamamy husband's antics.

This story is patently untrue on several counts: One, because my grandmother was actually still married to her first husband during the war, who died heroically in the Battle of the Bulge, so my grandpa wouldn't be mailing her giant dead cats from Africa as he wasn't actually married to her yet, and you just don't mail dead cats to anyone but your spouse; that would be quite irregular. Two: While the cat looks giant and terrifying to a small child's eyes, as an adult I can see that it's actually pretty small for a leopard. It was probably a baby, which is a real bummer. It probably didn't eat a little boy, and died just for being a leopard. Ugh, that is really depressing.

But I'm actually still pretty sure you could totally just throw a dead leopard in a box and mail it overseas in the 1940s, so at least that bit holds up.

My point is that my grandma didn't have Nutella in her kitchen. But for those of you who had grandmas who did have Nutella in their kitchens, I ask you to please recall some of the other things your grandma had in her kitchen, and then make your own judgements on how great this Nutella thing really is.

For instance, my grandmother always had a stock of Combos, the pretzel bites with fake, powdery cheese inside that sometimes came in pizza flavor. She also had those Entenmann's boxes of neon colored cupcakes with three inches of icing made entirely out of congealed sugar and Crisco, sometimes with an additional little sugar four-leaf clover on them for St. Patrick's Day. She also had a cookbook from the forties that suggested using sliced hot-dogs as the meat in a lasagna. My point is this: grandma is not the person to go to when it comes to delicious snacks that won't slowly kill you.

So, your grandmas might have some Nutella in their kitchens alongside their canned meats-in-water. Your grandmas, and my husband. He smears it on everything, and eats it on bread for breakfast in the morning. Call it what you want, nothing on Earth will make that abomination breakfast.

I don't want you thinking that I'm totally Nutella-intolerant. I accept Nutella as a complement to things like ice cream, where Nutella-flavoring is pleasant and light, or perhaps smeared on a banana like something you'd buy from George Michael Bluth, because bananas+chocolate+nuts is already an acceptable treat in civilized society. But you don't smear glorified chocolate icing on bread and call it a snack, and you certainly don't call it breakfast. You just don't.

And before you start taking nutritional tips from Europeans because they're all skinny or whatever, let me remind you that French cuisine especially is basically just eggs, fat, cheese, eggs, and cholesterol piled on top of each other for every meal. They're not skinny because they eat properly, they're skinny because you can only eat so much (or, incidentally, so little) of that shit until your body physically rejects it out of any and all orifices.

So go ahead and drink your Nutella shakes and gobble up your Nutella cookies and smear it all over your bread products and limbs and big round bellies gorged to bursting with hazelnut-chocolate icing spread. You and I both know that when it comes right down to it, Nutella is fucking disgusting, and it's your sick little addiction, not mine.

My Rabbit had an Abortion.

I call Ivy my rabbit "joues" sometimes because it means "cheeks" in French and she's got the fattest little pinchy-cheeks ever. I used to call her "cheeks" but the secondary meaning made me feel like I was calling her a butt face, which she is decidedly not. Her cheeks are so pinchy that they make her mouth into a square and she looks like a grumpy fat banker in a cartoon about a grumpy, villainous fat banker. He's going to up your rent and take your house and also chew on some of the furniture until you clap your hands to scare him. I don't call her joues in public however because it sounds exactly like the English word "Jew" if you pronounced the "J" in "Jew" like a flambuoyant asshole and "are you eating your poops today, Jew?" sounds odd out of context drifting out of an open window on the summer breeze. Furthermore everyone knows that Ivy was in fact baptized in a formal Roman Catholic mass sacrifice like all of God's rightful children.

Because we're moving a lot recently and are for all intents and purposes a gypsy family of transients at the moment, we had to get really smart about our stuff. So we carefully went through all of our shit and our paperwork, including the bunny adoption papers. While I was leafing through them, ruing the amount of money we spent on rabbit painkillers when we should have just given them a spoon to bite down on (get a job, you parasites) I noticed some additional paperwork on Ivy's spay.

Basically, Ivy had an abortion, you guys. She actually had like four at once, since there were four babies in her belly when she got spayed. See, when the vet goes in to do a spay, they can't really tell if the rabbit is going to have babies in her uterus or not, so it's kind of a surprise when they remove it. Surprise! Dead bunny fetuses! Good morning, by the way!

See, this brings me to a dilemma. I just feel like for Catholic adopters such as myself and Julien, the shelter might have had some sort of warning. Maybe a big red "A" painted on her cage or something. I mean, what are we, a convent? We can't just be taking in every slutty teenaged bunny mother in the metro area, it's obscene. And now how am I supposed to deal with her? Now that I know she's just a bunny whore, how do I introduce her to my impressionable babies? We have a boy bunny in this household, how can I trust them alone together? We are God-fearing people in this house.

Who is the father, even? I bet she doesn't even know. I can't even walk into a pet store now without being plagued by thoughts of my rabbit's licentiousness. I saw a pair of bunnies just the other day with a similar rare spot pattern to hers. Are they her kids too? Don't ask Ms. Welfare Queen over here, she'll just give you a side-eye and beg for a carrot. Always take, take, taking. I don't even want to get into the numerous times I've found her in bed with my husband. "Oh she just wanted a little scratch, it's perfectly innocent", "Oh she just wanted to push the blanket around for some reason", "Oh your pillow case is torn up because she got lost inside of it and tried to claw herself out". Right. Listen, I don't care what kind of weird shit you're into, just keep it in the litter box.

So now here I am, entrapped into caring for this rabbit of the night, who won't even suckle her own young because it would be "inconvenient" for her to "develop a gynecological cancer". So, we've weighed our options and we've decided to start accepting recipes for rabbit stew. If we find any good ones, the Republican party is welcome to them. What other choice have we...?

HEY. YOU. IN THE SUIT.

Hey. American men. Your suits don't fucking fit. They never have and they never will, because you do not understand or appreciate how to buy or wear proper attire, or anything besides over-large wrestling t-shirts and dress socks with sneakers.

You're standing there, on the subway, winking at me like you're fucking hot shit while wearing a blue body/white cuffs and collar combo shirt like it's 1984 and you just stock marketed the shit out of Wall Street or whatever the fuck bank people do. Furthermore, you're wearing black motherfucking trousers with a shirt that's the type of blue that says "I'm just slightly too dark to be robin's egg blue, but definitely not dark enough to be interesting, so I'll just be the most corporate-looking, hospital-issued scrubs color that I can possibly be". And are those actual buttons on a fake French cuff? Where do you even find a lying liar shirt like that?

Are those brown shoes with black trousers, you son of a bitch? The only people who can get away with wearing mismatched shoes and trousers are priests on vacation, because they only have one pair of black dress shoes that they have to wear with everything. No one else gets a pass. I'm talking to you, boat-shoes-and-jeans. Who do you think you are? Hm?

This is not to even touch upon you bitches wearing jackets three sizes too large in the shoulders. Oh, you think I forgot because it's summer and everyone is walking around in shirt sleeves? I never forget. You think you can hit on me in the street while looking like you're wearing your big brother's one nice suit to your First Communion and that won't make some kind of an impression? Think again, dicks!  And just because you've foregone the jacket for the summer doesn't mean you can swim around in your giant-bodied dress shirt and think no one will notice because you tucked the four yards of excess fabric into your khakis that balloon out at the pleated front like a middle-aged woman's hips that she used to bear her eleven children. I noticed, and you look like a goddamn fool. Also, hem your trousers, Fred Mertz, it's not 1950 anymore.

I'd like to take a moment now and talk a little bit about ties. If you do not know how to wear a tie, do not wear a fucking tie. If you're pretty sure you know how to wear a tie and think your five-inch wide G.I. Joe print is an appropriate look for anyone other than a 1930s gangster attending some kind of bizarro time-traveling comic con, you are incorrect. If you think any kind of themed pattern is appropriate for anyone other than suicidal high school teachers, you are also incorrect. If you think you can wear anything other than a subdued diagonal stripe, you are probably still incorrect, just let the professionals handle that. I'm talking to you, checkered-shirt-and-paisley-tie guys. You're an inspiration.

So the next time one of you dicks wants to judge another person based on what they're wearing, be it a woman walking down the street in a tiny dress on a sweltering hot summer day, or a little baby-faced kid in a sweatshirt out to get some Skittles and iced tea from a corner store, you take a long, hard look at just what you're wearing and you shut your damn mouth.

A Portrait of KillGore Destructo 3000

I’ve had my rabbit Gorie since she was a baby and so the only thing she’s really ever known is me, Julien, and our apartment. I found her on Craigslist, and because I'm a hero, I saved her from this horrible family that I've come to think of as the Malevolent Bunny gods of Greek Bunny Lore, creating life just to destroy it on a whim. I named her Killgore Destructo 3000, which should have clued them in that I was probably not a suitable adopter. I just regret that I didn't take more than one of the bunnies from her litter. They had two rabbits that they bred every few months and gave away the babies to like, anyone. Just email them on craigslist and they will hand you a tiny life, no questions asked.  I mean, who the hell am I?

"Please do not eat me."

Beyond the fact that Gorie's mom will almost absolutely develop some type of painful gynecological condition and die horribly from all this, bunnies generally have about four babies in every litter, and they can breed every fucking month because their gestation period is only 30 days. Conservatively, that's like, a million babies per rabbit, in the hands of fucking idiots who are going to just toss them at random passersby who will in turn give them to their ugly, slobbery children for Easter so they can drag the poor things around by their ears until they die from neglect or abuse or stupidity. That, or they're just handing them right over to butchers so that they can breed and then cook them as well. Pleasant. These are pleasant thoughts.

BABY!

Anyway, Gorie was my introduction into bunny motherhood, and it was a real learning experience. For instance, did you know that rabbits are psychotic? I didn't either, until I rushed Gorie to the vet after she was twisting her head around like a maniac then jumping butt-first through the air in a sort of spaz-leap. Then she'd stand on the floor, helplessly hopping to the left and right while shaking her head like a jittery meth addict. I literally thought she had a neurological condition. When we got to the vet she was like "oh, yeah, bunnies do that when they're happy. It's called a binky, which is a ridiculous word for a ridiculous thing."It is a ridiculous thing, and they all do it. It will scare the crap out of you if you're not ready for it. One minute the bunny is sitting calmly at your feat, the next it's doing a backflip over your knee and then landing looking like it's just as surprised as you are.

Another moment of discovery was when I realized how bunnies lay down, and get ready because it is also ridiculous. You know how dogs and cats and every other normal animal, including humans, crawl into a laying-down position gradually and reasonably? Yeah, bunnies don't do that. See, bunnies don't sleep, really. They take thousands of little micro-naps throughout the day by sitting back on their haunches and cuddling into their own bunny-fat with their eyes wide open (which is terrifying at first). The only way you can tell they're sleeping is because their nose stops moving. They rarely, if ever, close their eyes or blink. They have a clear third eyelid allegedly, but I've never seen it. So how do bunnies relax? Well, on a hot summer afternoon a few days after you take them home, they will be sitting perfectly still, then suddenly and without warning, flop over on one side as if they just got shot with a gun. You will be terrified that your rabbit just died of heat stroke right in front of you.

End position.

To this day it surprises me when any of them lay down (and they do it every day), because it's such a sudden, violent fall. They just twist their bodies like they're going to do a sideways barrel-roll and end up laying down to rest.

Also, did you know bunnies eat their poops right out of their butt for added nutrition? Now you know, and you can never un-know it.

Here's a visual. And yes, that's my bed.

Gorie spent her childhood running from one end of my bedroom to the other, eating all of my worldly possessions, hiding in inconveniently small spots, getting progressively too big to fit in the small spots but still trying to fit in them, and also sitting on my butt and eating the ends of my hair when I laid face-down on my bed. Which is weird, even for a rabbit. None of my other rabbits eat hair. 

In a panicked moment when I thought I lost her, I opened this drawer to grab a sweater and go out and look for her. 

She's probably the most intuitive of all the three rabbits, mostly because she's spent so much time with me. She uses this intelligence to avoid doing anything I want her to do and to be a general all-around diva, all the time. For instance, if I have treats like baby carrots or some coveted piece of fruit, she will be the most excited ever up until the second I give a piece to Alfie before I give it to her, because he's closer to me or he grabs it first. Then, you would think I spit in her face the way that she dramatically turns and goes to sulk in a hidey-hole. 

She also won't take a treat that I give her to reward her for something that sucks, like cutting nails or taking medicine. She just turns her nose up at it until I'm out of sight, and then gobbles it up before I come back. I've literally hid behind a door and watched her do this. Alfie has picked up this bad habit of shaming me for my bad deeds, except he learned quickly that it's a bad idea because Gorie will take the opportunity to snatch his treat away while he's being sulky. 

...the quick and the dead.

She looks like a hare, but an exceptionally pretty one with gorgeous details like the white spots on her eyes and jawline and the little black line at the tips of her ears. Like the Cinderella of field rabbits, except that her prince looks like a little crazy homeless man who sneezes constantly. 

Love.

Breaking the Lease.

We're breaking our lease because of street harassment.

When we took this apartment in Crown Heights, we knew the area was depressed and the subway was a little far, but it was what we could afford at the time and we figured we would just make do for the time being. We were moved in by February, and our least was a year and a half long.

It's an important point that we moved in the dead of winter: it means that people generally weren't out on the street. Now, I'm no stranger to men shouting at me on the street. It's happened to me every day since I was thirteen years old. I grew up a bit of a latchkey child, and there wasn't always someone around to check the clothes I was wearing before I left for school. I had no idea, of course. I was a child. I didn't know that if I wore my sister's white tank top without a bra, men could see right through it to my tiny breasts, just beginning to grow. And I certainly didn't think that men would be interested in any of that, but I suppose we all grow up some time, don't we?

I was shouted at from cars when I walked to school, and followed on buses. Grown men would start conversations with me, a kid who still played with Tamigotchis. I've never felt so ashamed, or suffocated. I couldn't choose the clothes I wore: I barely had enough to make it through the week without stealing my sister's or brother's. But I was shouted at no matter what I wore, whether it was my brother's pants dragging around my waist or my sister's lacy tops. I felt like I'd brought it on myself, that it was my fault. I didn't know how to stop it, and it scared me. It made me feel unsafe and vulnerable, like any of these men could do whatever they wanted, at any time. But that's the point, of course.

It's an insistence that your appearance is what's important about you, the only thing that's important about you. We get it all the time, from every source imaginable: from history to advertisements to TV programs to movies. We get it so much that some women have internalized it to a point where they can't actually even see that yelling something at someone in the street is not a great idea and actually kind of an arrogant, violently insistent thing to do, no matter what the actual words are that are coming out of your mouth. We need to be more aware of our circumstances, and stop eating up this garbage about our appearance.

Anyone who's convinced themselves that street harassment has anything to do with sex is just sadly misguided. These men know as well as you or I do that nothing is going to come of yelling at a perfect stranger in the street. Anybody can see that, and in fact it's just a sad joke to say otherwise. Instead, what it is is an assertion of an authority that they're not quite sure they have. It's a false bravado, pathetically insisting that they have a right to intrude on your day, your body, your personal space. They puff themselves up to seem important enough that their opinion, their judgement might actually mean something. Some of them might even believe that they're so vitally important: and why not? They've been taught it their whole lives. Men are somebodies with important stories and women are the supporting characters, the color, the scenery.

At the time I moved into our current apartment, I was in a play with a man who was violently sexual in a stunted, impotent way. I'd been in a play with him once before with the same director, and he would stand in his underwear backstage, just staring at women. Then one day I caught him touching himself, onstage, during a scene where he was lying hidden behind a couch. I told the director, who shrugged it off and didn't want to address it. When I started avoiding the actor, he pushed me violently onstage and hurt my shoulder in an "accident". I felt vulnerable and uncomfortable, but like most people, I naturally stopped fighting about it when someone treated my problem like it was a non-issue.

I assumed, stupidly, that in the next show with this theatre group, they wouldn't dare hire someone who was so openly creepy. So I joined the cast, and the first day I saw this guy waltz his stupid fat head into rehearsal. This time around he upped the ante: he set a chair outside of the women's dressing room and peeped his head in every time the door opened. He would pace back and forth in front of the door, visibly lurking. When I finally slammed the door shut in the middle of a performance in a passive aggressive attempt to get him to stop, he just started getting more and more ballsy until one of the girls screamed at him to "get out, you fucking pervert!"

Then he took to Facebook, calling us "cunts". When we joked openly about it the next day, he tripped me onto the stage right before an entrance, and tore at another girl's arm onstage. He was quietly raging, and nearly unable to control himself. He took to Facebook later to threaten to cut our hands off. Cut our hands off, guys.

When one of the lead actresses vented about him at the cast party to which he surprisingly did not show up (I guess because we'd all have our clothes on) someone leaned over to me and said "Not the right time" in a judgey fucking tone. But here's the fucking thing: It's never the right goddamn time. This girl was angry, and completely rightfully so. She was venting out of earshot of the cast member who was victimizing us, to exactly the right people who could make a decision to not cast him again in that theatre. The right time to do something was before he was cast again, was in the last show when he should have been spoken to by someone--anyone with authority. Instead, I was brushed off. The other girls who were disturbed by his behavior were brushed off. We are always brushed off. Our rightful and justified anger is dismissed, constantly.

Even during the show I had other women scoff at me: 'Are you really being victimized?' As if I have to justify my feelings to anyone. Yes, I feel victimized. A man is lurking in a zone that is supposed to be private. I have a right to want my body to be private. I find that these sorts of people have one view of the world, and that's their own. They feel that because they're not personally affected by an issue, that means it doesn't exist. If you aren't personally bothered by sexual harassment or don't personally consider this or that sexual harassment, that means that no one should be affected, and men should have a right to do whatever they like to or at someone because they can find one singular woman who said once that she didn't mind it or found it to be a compliment. To take the concept to its absurd extreme, if I can find one woman who says that rape is the responsibility of the victim, that means that rape doesn't exist and all these silly women should just shut their mouths about it and take the compliment of someone wanting to have sex with you so badly that they'd force it.

Let's get another thing straight: Harassment isn't a compliment, and even if you want to categorize it as a compliment, I've got news for you. Compliments from strangers suck, they are the fucking worst. Compliments are the sole responsibility of the person doing the complimenting. For instance, if you say something to someone that you don't know very well, and they don't take it as a compliment, that's on you. You decided your opinion was important enough to share with this person, and it's your responsibility to know that the person will take your compliment well. If they don't, it's your fault. If someone wants to cry me a river over how that means no one is going to say your hair looks really good today, I say grow a backbone and have enough confidence in yourself that you don't need that sort of outside validation. Because the people who already know you well will always tell you that you did an awesome job on that presentation, or that your new project is super fucking interesting, or that you have the raddest collection of crazy bike helmets on the planet. Furthermore, when you purposefully put your work or yourself out there for judgement, say at a concert or an exhibition, people will know when and how to compliment you properly and will totally do it. But if some random stranger came up to you apropos of nothing and told you that your face was shaped nicely, that's fucking weird. Who is this stranger? Why do they care about the shape of my face enough to speak words about it? Why is my face shape important? What is their general idea of face shapes, and do they align with what I think my face shape should be? It's nonsense. It's just nonsense.

So during the run of the aforementioned play, the weather gets warmer in my neighborhood, and all the creeps slime out of their hibernation to hang out in front of the grocery stores all fucking day, because who would have anything to do in the middle of the god-damn day, in the middle of the motherfucking workweek? And it's worse at night, because it gives them the cover of darkness to try and corner me, or chase me for a bit just to make sure that I know they're in charge. So I'm basically getting at it from all sides, all the time, with no safe zone except my apartment where I hide all day if I have nothing dire to get done.

And so I start yelling. First, it's just a few 'fuck you's here and there. Some girls I know tell me to say "I'm married!" to them. I just... I just have to laugh at that though. Guys, they don't give a shit if I'm married, and saying so just looks like I'm playing along, and get this: I'm not fucking playing along, no sir. So I start off with this little thing: I say, "excuse me?" and... if you know me, you know I'm capable of a really withering stare when I want to have one. And it's just, perfect. I know that not every girl is so good at being a bitch as I am, but it feels so good. I scolded some little twelve year old brat in the street (the same age I was when I started getting harassed). Like, as if I'm taking shit from some punkass little shithead. Come on. I even got the guys who stand with their legs apart, sideways on the sidewalk to watch you as you go past. They watch you coming, then as you pass behind them they turn their heads to watch you as you go. I do a little thing where I stop immediately behind them for just long enough to get them startled that I didn't emerge from the other side, and I'm just creeping behind their backs. Once I even stood there with wide creep eyes, but you can't do that to everyone. Who has the time?

But I'm thwarted, and I'll tell you by what: by the guys in suits. The guys in suits on the subway, who walk up to me while I have my headphones in, gesture for me to take them out (which I do, like a fucking idiot, thinking they need directions or something. But why would they ask a woman for those...?) and then tell me that they just needed to express how stylish my outfit is. And I'm speechless. I'm so angry that this asshole made me pull out my headphones, interrupted a thought pattern I had going, to interject his motherfucking opinion into my stream of consciousness as if I should give any of the shits. And he's operating under the guise of being polite, so if I yell at him I just look like a crazy person. The best I've ever done with this demon is stare at him blankly while slowly putting my earbuds back in.

But my perspective is not the only perspective. Just because I've decided to have fun with this shit doesn't mean everyone can do that... and it doesn't mean that it hasn't disturbed me enough to break our lease and eat the financial loss. I've woken up to a man wandering around the fire escape outside of my bedroom window, and been afraid to sleep with the window cracked on hot nights. I have an issue with stomach pains, and sometimes when men shout at me on the street the stress actually causes a searing pain when I lose my concentration. I can feel the stress in an immediate way that other women can't... they just feel the cumulative effect and they attribute it to a myriad of things. But I know the kind of pain sexual harassment causes.

It's like getting sprayed with a mysterious fluid out of a spray bottle held by a stranger while you walk down the street. This time, it might just be a harmless liquid like water that annoys you and ruins your day. Or it could be deadly dangerous. You never know, and women shouldn't have to take those risks every day. Whether you're personally bothered by it or not, street harassment is a devastation to our equality and autonomy as women. Kay, the end.

Also check out my bunny blog THAANNKKSSS: No Fears Rabbit Ears

A Portrait of Princess Ivy

Princess Ivy is our newest addition. She is a rabbit, if that wasn't clear.

This is her. She's a rabbit.

At the shelter when we adopted her, the day was so stressful and difficult (it was just after Easter and there were a lot of abandoned rabbits there), that when I misheard a shelter-worker say that her spot-pattern isn't usual for a rabbit and that it's more common in Appaloosa horses, I thought she was saying that Ivy is technically a horse, and I just completely accepted it in order to move on with the adoption.

Not a horse.

Ivy was abandoned twice at the shelter by owners who "didn't have time for her". As a result, she's not that comfortable with humans. She was a little afraid and aggressive at first and would growl at our hands when we tried to pet her. If you've never heard a bunny growl, it's just about the cutest little thing. She wants to kill me! D'awww. Little punim. She'd even pounce a little on our hands. Yiddle wabbit thinks she's a killing machine. Cutie!

She's a princess because the diamond-pattern on her forehead looks like a tiara. It's not that she's a diva... she's more like Princess Merida, Tiny Adventurer of the Apartment on Carroll Street. If there's an inconvenient and annoying space for her to crawl into and proceed to make a lot of noise chewing apart while you stand helplessly listening to her destroy the underside of your couch, she will find it. If there's a window sill that she can comfortably sit on while she attempts to put her mouth against the glass and try to chew the actual window pane for some reason (not the rubbery corners, she just knocks her teeth against the actual smooth pane of glass), she will find a way to get there.

WHY CAN'T I EAT GLASS.

We think she might have been in a home with a dog at some point, because all of her mannerisms are like a dog. She growls when she's playing with the tiny jingly plastic cat-balls that we give her, and she'll sometimes fetch one and bring it back to you. More likely, she'll do this weird bunny-thing where she'll pick up the item that you give to her, and then place it slightly to the left in a very dramatic arc-like gesture. All bunnies do this. You can keep giving her items, and she will just make a neat little pile of those items, slightly to the left. If you ever need a tiny pile of cat toys and balls of paper, she is your lady. Also, if you ever need an imaginary hole dug in a corner... just come to my apartment and yell "Ivy, I need a small pile of things slightly to the left of where you are, and an invisible hole in that corner, STAT!" But she'll probably just run and hide because she doesn't know you, and why are you yelling in her house??

There's also a chance that she was roommates with a piglet at some point, because she oinks at her toys sometimes. Or maybe a bull, because she head-butts me frequently. More likely, she's just a freaky little weirdo bunny.

And she is gonna get you. 

Do you like bunny-related reading material such as this one? Well, then you are in luck because I happen to be writing another bunny-centric blog about rabbit care.

Click on it here: No Fears, Rabbit Ears

Or share it with your bunny-loving friends!
Note: it is almost certainly not illustrated as much as you want it to be. I'm working on that.

A Portrait of J. Alfred Fluffernut

This is a portrait of J. Alfred Fluffernut, our second rabbit.

A majestic beast.

We adopted him from a shelter on Long Island after he got along very well with Gorie when we brought her there for a "date". His name was "Gabriele" there, which you may note is a stupid cross between "Gabriel" and "Gabrielle", and was rightfully changed. He was abandoned at the shelter after Hurricane Sandy, along with another rabbit called Canterfloss that wasn't adoptable because he had humped her into a catatonic state. After her experience with him, she refused to be in a room with male rabbits that weren't old and decrepit enough that she could possibly take them in a fight. That is not a joke, get your animals fucking spayed and neutered, bitches!

Thankfully, the shelter had neutered him before throwing him in with Gorie, and it was love at first sight. He does still nip her in the butt every once in a while to get her to run around and play with him, but he doesn't terrorize her like he did poor Canterfloss. (Who is doing well in a foster home, so I've heard. But that might just be shelter people's way of saying she "lives on a farm, now..." But no. She's doing great. Again, spay and neuter your animals.) Sometimes, though, when we're trying to get him to make friends with our new bunny, Ivy, while she's sitting in a corner terrified of these new rabbits in this strange new place, he'll go up and nip her right in the face like a fucking idiot. He wants to play, and he doesn't have the social grace enough to realize that maybe he should just focus on sitting and staring for a while, like a normal goddamn rabbit.

He's a lionhead/angora mix, which for those few of you who are not familiar with rabbit breeds means he looks ridiculous. Lionheads are so-called because they have tiny little manes of fur around their neck and ears, and angoras have luxurious, long coats that make them look like silky mops or those silly little show-dogs. Alfie is a mix, meaning he has a sort of silky rockstar mane and a line of long fur around his butt like a tutu.

Alfie, working it despite being fucking bummed at the shelter. ADOPT!

Gorie, our first rabbit, is a really beautiful rabbit with a short, sleek, subtly graded coat that goes from gray to tan with adorable white spots around her bright eyes and on her little waggily tail, and Alfie literally looks like a crazy-eyed alien baby. He barely even looks like a rabbit, and if he does, he's either a drunk hobo rabbit or a scarecrow. For rabbits. His nose is all squashed and his matted fur (which is incredibly long because he’s an inbred disaster of an attempt to breed tiny long-haired rabbits) tangles around his little grumpy-old-man mouth because his eyes are constantly tearing and streaming down his face-fur. He’s basically white with a confusing grey alien crop circle on his butt, with dark brown ears and legs that are too tiny so that when he hops around he looks like a furry little chicken nugget. He puts his two front paws too close together when he sits, so he slowly begins to lean to one side sometimes when he loses his balance. He makes a weird little noise when he drinks water (and he drinks so much water) that might be a little satisfied grunt or might be the sound water makes when it travels through such a weird little snout.

Loves water and laying eggs for Easter, in that order. Go ahead and try to make the point that males don't lay eggs.  

He has an incurable chronically leaking eye. There's a sciencey name for it, but suffice it to say that he cries sticky little tears out of this one eye near constantly. The only way we can get Gorie, his bunny buddy, to groom his eye and keep the tears from getting matted up in his long freaking fur (and yes, that means she licks away the sticky gross tears, and yes rabbits are absolutely disgusting) is by cutting it really short so she doesn't have trouble, so that his thick fur looks more like a lamb's wool, and in fact with his funny ears and weird little face he looks almost just like a lamb when his hair is short. There aren't any reasonable groomers that cut rabbit hair (for good reason), and so we have to do it ourselves, and we are terrible at it. It looks absolutely awful, but the up side is that he manages to be even cuter when he's running around with an absolutely ugly freaking haircut. Part of that is because he loves being free from the binds of his long hair, and he runs around like a little maniac and shakes his butt in the air out of pure bunny joy, which is better and cuter than regular joy.

Some of the fur around his eyes has been naturally groomed off (because he leaks), and he never had the pretty dark eyelashes that our other bunnies have that give them that sort of half-eyelid look, so the end result is that he looks constantly super nervous about being a rabbit. The whites of his eyes show sometimes, which is unusual for a rabbit unless they're very stressed, but it's just another by-product of having gross leaky tear ducts. He's also naturally a little bit of a nervous nelly, pricking his head up at the sound of literally anything at all, and so his mannerisms are constantly a little ridiculous-looking, especially when you couple that with his ridiculously tiny legs, a result of rabbit inbreeding.

He has a skinny little body frame (mostly because Gorie steals all his treats) but has a fat little rabbit butt, so when you pick him up he feels like a baby: delicate, but bottom-heavy. He has a nervous nose-- all rabbits' noses work constantly, but his is a little quicker than usual. He also has a habit of taking a huge pieces of parsley (his favorite) and pulling it up towards the ceiling, nearly doing a backflip trying to eat the entire thing in one munch.

He sneezes constantly. Part of the problem is his clogged sinuses (again from the leaky eyes), and part of the problem is that he's a little bit allergic to the dust in hay. Rabbits need to have a constant source of hay, so the solution is that Alfie sneezes like a maniac, all the time. If you've never heard a bunny sneeze, it truly makes your heart grow three sizes, trust me.

So basically we have this crazy-eyed little hobo-monster running around all the time and sneezing like a cartoon character, next to our beautiful, stoic, hare-like field rabbit. And he is devoted to her. He follows her around constantly, flopping down next to her whenever she sits down. Gorie is a real licker, she gives constant, constant kisses. Sometimes when you pet her she licks the floor, out of habit and because she can't reach your hand. Alfie never really got the hang of grooming Gorie, and he never really licked us at all, and we figured out why recently.

Every once in a while when we came home, Gorie would have a ridiculous little wet spot right in the middle of her forehead where her fur was all matted and poking up like a mohawk. We thought maybe she was dunking her head in the water bowl or something, until we started seeing her with little weird spots like this on her back and butt. Then we saw it in action: Alfie was grooming her, and he was freaking terrible at it. He's like a bad kisser: earnestly going at it while Gorie waits patiently for him to be done, rolling her little bunny eyes.

The other day, I was laying on the floor and cuddling Alfie a bit. Suddenly he sat up, and started anxiously sniffing around my ear. I felt a single, solitary lick on the middle ridge of my ear, and then he immediately pranced away to hide. I'm not ashamed to say that I was very moved. My little monster finally trusted me enough to give me a single terrible kiss.

If you enjoyed this bunny-related material and would like to learn more about bunnies and bunny-goings-on, I'm writing a new blog about rabbit maintenance: No Fears, Rabbit Ears

Please visit, or share with rabbit-loving friends!

Laundrophobia.

I first realized I had a problem when Julien came home one day to find me carefully navigating the dripping stalactites of wet clothing hanging from every available surface in our bathroom, bedroom, and kitchenette in order to move freely about the apartment.

The rabbits were being terrorized by mysterious droplets of water coming from the Heavens above their little abode and splashing right on their little bunny butts unexpectedly, causing them to leap into the air and then scatter. They huddled under tables and inside their little grass huts and watched helplessly, confused by this water coming from the sky. It was their version of a locust plague, and I'm sure at least one of them is a devout believer in Bunny Jesus after the incident where a pair of soaking wet pants came splatting down into their enclosure.

In an attempt to avoid the laundromat, I had washed every article of clothing in our laundry basket in the actual bath tub, like a confused 1930s washerwoman, and then hung them out to dry with the aid of neither clothesline nor outdoor air. I had been intimidated earlier by the wide array of clothes-drying products in the local hardware store, and thus neglected to buy any lest the hardware store guy think I was stupid or something. Likewise, I didn't want our neighbors seeing me putting out clothes on the fire escape like an idiot, so our wet clothes hung in our apartment for a few days, while I, forcefully cheerful, insisted that they'll surely be dry any day now.

In the winter, I would wash my underwear in the sink under the guise of it being delicate and the label clearly said to hand-wash. Hanging it, along with some socks and slips and shirts that I included "because I was already doing a wash" on my little mini drying rack and setting it in front of the radiator with a space heater running next to it worked perfectly for me. Julien did a bigger wash on weekends, to avoid my "helping" him with some of his clothes, while I cowered in the apartment, opening and closing the wash-pins I'd bought because I'd seen them at my grandma's house before and knew how they worked.

This isn't an issue with washing clothes. I've done my own wash since I taught myself as a really young girl, after an unfortunate incident where the one pair of pants I owned and wore every day got so big from over-wearing that couldn't keep them up at my waist and I simply had to wash them. But I didn't know how, so I just sprayed them with an ungodly amount of Febreeze that I'd found and dried them with a hair dryer, so that all day people around me were asking what smelled like someone urinated on dryer sheets. It was me. I smelled like that.

It's partly a problem with my current neighborhood. When we moved in and I was carrying a heavy something from the subway to the apartment, I had a man come up behind me and whisper "don't drop it, don't drop it" in my ear as he followed me for a block. I'm harassed on the street daily, to the point where if I don't have to leave the apartment for anything very important, I just don't.

But mostly it's an issue I've always had when I have to do "normal people things". I've always been an alien, and so there are times, almost every day, when I just feel like an impostor masquerading in a human body, and it's always in the most banal situations. Throw a woman pooping into a bag on the subway at me, and I am cool as a cucumber. Tell me to organize a ragtag team of artists to stand on the street and sell pick-up lines for twenty-five cents, and I'm in my element. I have photos to prove it. Ask me to yell at some bastard on the street, and you will find no better person. Make me do some grocery shopping, and you might as well have sentenced me to death. I will avoid it until I am literally sucking on crackers to make them last all day. I'm a creative person because I've had to discover how to use the resources that I have instead of going to the Rite-Aid, in front of everyone, to purchase what I need. I get nervous poops when shopping for kitchenware, like at any moment my skin is just going to unravel and I'll be exposed for the lizard-person I am.

I've since conquered grocery shopping because of the bunny rabbits (they need to eat every day, apparently) and Julien (I can't just feed him lettuce, apparently) and because I would be dead by now if I hadn't. Also, I can do it after hours, far from the watchful gaze of daytime people. Similarly, I've moved on from carrying all my money bundled in a pink Disney Princess wallet to putting it in a banking institution, which I attend regularly in the dead of night to use the ATMs when no one can see me. I can even order at Starbucks, although I'm somehow still bad at it.

But anything that I can secretly do in the privacy of my own home without having to expose my dirty laundry to the world, I will go way out of my way to do, hiding from normal people who don't even have to think once about their daily routines, while I'm still just the troll living under a bridge. I live there because I can do my laundry in the river.

Excuse me...?

…Excuse me? Did you just speak to me? Well, then I assume because you’re a complete fucking stranger yelling at me while I have my headphones in that you were warning me of some imminent danger or asking for directions or helpfully bringing to my attention a school of ducks that have been following me. Oh, no? You just wanted to tell me that you would destroy my pretty little ass?

Let me stop you right there. We’re gonna break this down for a minute, sir.

Now, both you and I know damn well that there is not one thing that will come of this interaction besides me being uncomfortable and annoyed (or, uncomfortable and enraged, as the case may be) and you feeling like some sort of big man for yelling disgusting things in the street like a drunken maniac. We both know that you don’t really think yelling at strangers in the street is step one of our society’s delicate courting ritual, so why exactly do you do it?

What’s that? Oh, I’m supposed to take it as a compliment. I’m sorry, who the fuck are you? I’m supposed to take your opinion as a compliment? You, the guy hanging out in front of the grocery store, with nothing to do in the middle of the god-damn day. You, the random guy in a suit on the subway. The hundreds of yous, lined up on the streets outside my apartment, constantly watching and leering, making sure that I can't make one move without a judgement, a comment. What kind of power trip are you on that makes you think your opinion is worth anything to me?

And that’s exactly it. You have no power. You’re nothing. And so for this brief moment, you’re using my body to make you feel like you have some kind of control. And really, that’s just sad.  

This Fucking Shithead: An Expletive-Filled Character Study

Ohhh, Mary. Mary, Mary, Mary.... Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary.

Mary, quite Contrary.

Mark my words, I will fucking destroy you.

As many of you know, Julien is working towards his immigration into the United States of America, Land of the Free, Home of the Brave. As part of his journey into Americanhood, we have taken on an immigration lawyer. The lawyer is fine, whatever. He's a little brusque, and somehow Julien always comes away from our meetings understanding three times more than I do even though they're held in his second language, but he's more accustomed to dealing with bureaucratic bullshit than I am, so that's reasonable. Again, whatever. My beef is with his motherfucking clerk, Fucking Mary, who I feel comfortable pinning as the worst person I have ever met in my life. I'm actually pretty sure her first name is actually "Fucking Mary" because there is no other way to refer to her.

I hate this woman. I hate her so much, guys.

First off, let's just begin with her office. The entire complex is a little run-down and cluttered, sort of like a Film Noir detective's office when he just moves in and has no time for yer lily-footed feather-dusting, because he's got murders to solve and dames to forcibly kiss. This office doesn't have quite the level of urgency as all that, so it's more like old cases are just quietly rotting in the piles of boxes that form a winding pathway through the cubicles.

Fucking Mary. She has her own office for some god-damn reason, and it is absolutely wallpapered in full-page print-outs of horrible, random, repetitive photos of her ugly and terrible child. The roly-poly little rat is pictured in many of the photos wearing a grey velour sweatsuit, because that's exactly the kind of thing terrible people stuff their ugly children into. I mean, I guess track suits are comfortable for kids or whatever, but grey? You don't put a kid in the color grey unless you hate that kid, or you're so devoid of interest or passion yourself that grey is the sort of color you see and think "well, it's a little too bubbly for my taste but for a child it's fine." Also, I'm using the term "wallpapered"quite literally here: the printed-out pages (of course the ink is running dry in most of them, because why make the effort to change the fucking cartridge for something you and your clients have to look at every single day?) line the wall from floor to ceiling, layered in the way that psycho-killers layer photos of their potential victims from the floor to the ceiling. It is exactly that kind of creepy. Who knows if it's even her child? I certainly didn't ask.

When the lawyer showed us to her office, he actually had to pick up a stack of rotting boxes himself and move them out of the room so he could fit another chair in front of her desk, while she just sat and watched this old man that she works for lift heavy things. She then proceeded to absolutely suck at taking basic information from a human, which sharp minds will note is the only fucking thing she ever has to do in her entire job description. Between misspelling every place-name, even after it's been spelled painstakingly several times by both Julien and myself, then misunderstanding the most basic and simple facts of life, she is actually slightly less useful than a broken Esperanto version Speak-N-Spell in terms of filing immigration paperwork: infuriatingly repetitive, disconcertingly inhuman, and somehow more confusing than if we did the whole thing in Russian.

Then she had the kindness to list all of the reasons Julien was going to be deported and probably also beaten and arrested for daring to apply for citizenship. She listed all of these reasons in the sort of lilting valley-girl voice reserved for the likes of Cher Horowitz, despite being a grown-ass adult with a fat and ugly child. She's a perfect storm of gratingly annoying and defeatist-by-proxy. I swear no one has enjoyed giving bad news so much since the Marquis de Sade announced his pending prison sentence to himself in the mirror.

Also, she has the human interaction skills of an annoying, prying child. When she got distracted during the interview process and began asking personal questions that happened to be a painful topic for me, she followed it up with this maddening, unrelenting series of "why? but why? why? why? why not? why?", that I seriously thought for a second that I'd died and fallen into some sort of Hell of Repetition. She actually sat there and made me cry with frustration, then with an entirely blank look on her face, as she stared at me like a dog stares at its owners playing chess, without comprehension or relation, she waited a beat and then, without a hint of irony, was like "yeah, but... why?" Which was when my brain switched off. That's it, and now I'm unsuccessfully climbing over Julien and precariously stacked bunch of immigration claims from the 1980s to get to the door, shouting through tears about how we're just going move to god-damn France, then, as I try to free one of my feet from a moldy box I've stepped in.

She's in the office a grand total of two and a half hours per day, and most of that is spent adding more curling, yellowed scotch-tape to the printer pages that are coming undone on her wall. We know that she's in the office for two and a half hours, because we've been forced to graph her in-office hours on several charts in order to actually get in touch with her at any point ever... you know, about the incredibly time-sensitive documents that she's in charge of, that dictate whether or not Julien can stay in the fucking country. We've actually been at the Starbucks on the corner, after a nine o'clock meeting with the lawyer, and watched her stumble into work at ten-thirty, with a coffee and a danish in hand. Pro tip: when you're already a half hour late for work, you should probably not be holding a coffee and a danish, especially when you're already a drooling fucking idiot.

I know that she's supposed to be in at ten because after weeks of "just missing" her when we were calling about the status of Julien's working papers, we finally started to take note of the times when we actually could call her. Those times are precisely: Ten fifty AM to eleven-thirty AM, after she's crawled late into work, forged a path through her rotting boxes of casework to her disgusting grimy desk with empty yogurt containers all over it and settled herself in for twenty minutes but before she takes her three-hour lunch break at eleven-thirty to buy more danishes and yogurt spoons, because she definitely isn't washing any of them so she just has to buy more. You can also sometimes reach her from two thirty to three forty-five (before she leaves for the day), if she didn't take her afternoon to rummage through the dumpsters outside of the apartments of short, fat Italian-American middle-aged men that just lost a lot of weight to find more industrial-colored track suits for her spawn.

We had a specific issue with our immigration papers, in that we moved from one apartment to another in the middle of the process, so we made it deadly clear to Goddamn Fucking Mary that since her department receives a notification whenever the government mails the paperwork to us, she absolutely must call us to tell us so we can make sure we've received it in one of the two mailboxes because otherwise Julien might get deported. Now, reader, I know you're a sharp pencil. Can you tell me what happened every single motherfucking time paperwork was mailed to us? That is correct, I would pick up the phone after having nervously checked with my roommates in my old apartment and run to pick up the papers that had been sitting there for three days, and pleasantly remind Mary what a waste of air and natural resources she is. She would then, without fail, oh yeah! remember to tell me about the last piece of paperwork that she forgot to tell me about, which we had picked up two weeks prior and notified her about at the time. She'd then remember the last phone call, and so on until we all die of confounded stupidity. We're all dead, of stupidity, and it is Motherfucking Mary who has killed us.