Juliette Miranda

Did you know that you can escape an alligator by running in a zig zag motion? It’s true. I read it online.

It’s good information to have should you ever be knee-deep in the Everglades, I suppose, but not entirely practical for someone like me, who is only stuck in her own self-obsession. Still, having just spent several hours and a few hundred dollars at the salon eliminating all traces of gray from my hair, I have to wonder if there’s a better way to avoid the threats that plague me.

I’ll be honest: my 30s are not what I expected. Every magazine I’ve read since the age of 13 has lead me to believe that the issues I faced as a hormonal teenager would magically disappear when I became an “adult.” But at this particular juncture in my life, I find that I have little more poise and just as many physical issues as I did 20 years ago.

Perhaps my first mistake is in thinking that I am an adult.

Every technical definition of “adult” that I can find uses words like “mature” and “fully grown”, none of which I’d actually apply to myself. Mature is my mother, a woman who wears Coach and a mink coat. I barely have the grace to pull off a suit jacket let alone something that requires its own warm weather storage locker. My personal style is more comparable to that of the Manson girls. Trust me, looking dated does not equal looking mature.

As for being “fully grown”, I think the general refusal of my boobs to inflate past an A cup essentially leaves me hovering somewhere short of developed.

You can spare me the “love yourself, love your body” claptrap. I love myself just fine. What I do not love is waking up to aching joints and more zits on my chin than an adolescent boy who only eats pizza and French fries.

The aching joints I understand: in an effort to control a metabolism that has gone into hibernation, I must now exert more than double the energy it used to take to burn off a day’s worth of eating. I employ every calorie-burning trick out there: I stand when I’m on the phone, I take the stairs, I park my car four miles from my office building… all in addition to regular exercise. The result? An extra pound when I eat after 9 p.m. and aching joints from being on my feet all goddamn day.

The zits I have no explanation for, aside from the fact that my skin obviously hates me. My dermatologist called it “adult acne” – a term I never heard once when I was a teen. All I heard was, “You’ll grow out of it.” I didn’t grow out of anything; I grew into my zits the same way I’ve grown into habitually lying about my age.

I’ve been adding years on my age ever since I turned 16. Admittedly, I’m not doing it now to convince anyone to buy me alcohol or cigarettes. Giving myself an extra year or two is more of a head game for myself really, kind of like setting a clock ahead: you glance at it, panic initially, then relax when you realize you’re not as far along at you thought.

It’s not that I’m unhappy being in my 30s, mind you. Sex has never felt better and I’ve finally paid enough dues to have earned a good career and wonderful relationship. I just can’t help but feel as though age is something I’m being pursued by instead of something I’m trying to catch up to.

“Fight it” and “self destruct” seem to be my only options these days, which is a sad revelation when I have been hoping for a physical respite ever since I bought my first bottle of Benzoyl Peroxide.

So, if you need me, I’ll be the one running… in a zig zag. It can’t hurt, right?

It is said that one of the characteristics of a serial killer is a history of torturing animals as a child. I suppose this makes sense, though it does raise a few questions about my own future as a reasonably upstanding member of society. Not that I ever tortured animals, mind you. At least, not live ones.

I’m only reminded of my questionable behaviors as a child thanks to my mother, who felt the need to share them with my guy during the course of his first meeting with my parents.

That certainly wasn’t the impression I was hoping they’d make. Although why I thought they’d be on better behavior is beyond me. These are the same people who used to meet my dates in the living room, where my dad’s bear skin rug was on display.

“You see that rug?” my dad would ask my dates. “I did that. And I can do it again.”

Needless to say, I didn’t have many dates in high school.

Still, at this point in my life you’d think my parents would be more inclined to shower my guy with tokens of wealth to get me off their hands. Sure, I’m in my 30s, but I must be worth at least few goats or cows or bags of grain… anything besides a “here’s our daughter, the potential serial killer” story hour. My parents need to work on their sales skills.

I had thoroughly prepped my guy before the meeting to just how deep my parents’ eccentricities run, though even I couldn’t predict what might come crawling out of their collective woodwork. Even my guy, who is utterly reasonable and unflappable, wasn’t quite prepared for the response he got to his amused request for dirt on me.

“Well, there is the bunny story….” my mother said.

It took a few beats for me to recall the story she was referring to. My repertoire of lifetime stupidity runs a bit long, and while I will generally own up to most of it, there are a few stunts so outer limits that I’ve blocked them from my mind.

My mother’s sardonic smile triggered the memory like an epileptic fit, and I had a sudden urge to grab my guy by the hand and bolt from the room. There is only a certain number of quirks any boyfriend should be required to absorb when meeting his girl’s parents: playful ribbing about bad grades in school, jokes about unfortunate fashion decisions, and maybe an embarrassing photo or two are all fair game. Animal mutilation stories, by my own personal standards at least, tend to push the limits.

Sensing my discomfort, my guy dug in his heels and demanded to hear the story. “This sounds good,” he said, likely opening the mental file marked “For future use to torture Juliette.”

He certainly got plenty of fodder. My mother could hardly contain her sick joy at relating how in fifth grade a friend and I took it upon ourselves to vandalize the Catholic school we attended.

Curriculum, not religion, was the reason we were both forced to attend the pompous, opium for the masses religious school, and needless to say, neither of us had particularly warm feelings for any of the nuns, priests or other figures who attempted to instill education in us there.

My friend, a wonderful boy who was my sole friend in grammar school, lived across the street from the school. On a playdate at his house one day, we encountered a fresh dead bunny rabbit in his backyard.

It was a fascinating thing for two fifth graders to see, and after a few curious pokes with a stick, I suggested we do something with it.

“We should leave it at school,” my friend suggested.

It seemed a good idea, especially since we had already been considering dropping a few of the orange parking cones on the heads of the religious statues that lined the front of the building. But for me, already a fan of horror movies (thanks, dad) and wary of authority figures with no real authority, just leaving the bunny corpse was hardly enough of a statement.

“Let’s crucify it!”

My friends eye widened. Being my friend and partner in crime, it only took him a few minutes to raid his dad’s workshop for supplies.

A few strips of balsa wood, some nails, and the wounds of Christ later, and we had a dripping monument of our rebellion. We managed to attach it to the school’s front door and gleefully ran back to his house to wash up and have a snack of Oreos and juice. It was one of the most satisfying moments in my childhood.

The reaction to our display was ridiculously overblown. Word of Satanic desecration, black masses and pagan vandalism swept through the school for weeks, but my friend and I were never caught. Apparently, the Holy Ghost isn’t much of a detective.

Oddly, I never hesitated to tell my mother about what we did. In fact, on the ride home from his house that day, I gave her a full account of our activities. I don’t remember what her reaction was, but I do remember never being punished. And considering her glee in announcing the story to my guy, I’m guessing she may be harboring just a bit of pride in my sick childhood prank.

All the disclaimers in the world don’t make the story any less grisly, so my cries of, “I was in 5th grade!” and “I have never responded well to authority!” only served to increase the peals of laughter from my guy and parents when the story came to a close.

I suppose I should be glad that there was laughter and not a hushed call to the local psych ward. And to his infinite credit, my guy has yet to panic – over the experience of meeting my parents, and over all the crazy and slightly alarming things he learned about me though them.

Of course, he won’t let me near any bunnies and turned down my suggestion that we go to the zoo, but I guess I don’t really blame him.

I talk a good game. Whether it’s because I’m delusional or just overconfident to a fault, I’m not entirely sure. But I rock. Just ask me.

The problem is that my awesomeness apparently has a few limits, and when challenged often makes me look more like a carnival prize than the jewel in a window at Tiffany’s I fancy myself to be.

My guy is beginning to discover this, and it has me worried. It’s not that I don’t want him to see me as I really am; I’d just rather my quirks weren’t quite so vivid in contrast to my bravado. Because although I’ve never lied about myself, I may have oversold certain “good” traits to compensate for the more freakish of my lot.

My love of horror movies, for example, is legendary. I’ll spend hours describing the intricate beauty of torture or re-enacting scenes from 70s exploitation movies and have consequently erected the façade that nothing scares me.

And it’s true – to a degree. Blood, screams, chainsaw wielding maniacs… none of it has an effect. But should a June bug start hurtling itself at the light fixture on my guy’s patio, I will, without hesitation, dart under the nearest chair and whimper uncontrollably.

“It’s just a June bug/cicada/grasshopper/20-pound thunder moth,” my guy will say whenever I have a shrieking fit over whatever creature lunges for me. “Don’t worry. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

Really, I appreciate the sentiment when it comes to keeping me safe from predators in parking garages, purse snatchers and scary mechanics at the vehicle emissions facility. But until he can control the flight path of a locust or the proximity of all the centipedes in a 20-mile radius, my guy is going to have to accept kissing me through the mesh of a bee keeper suit if he wants my company on his porch.

Still, for as terrified as I am of the back porch, my guy is likely just as terrified to enter a bathroom after I’ve been in there styling my hair. I make no secret about how important my hair is to me, and how much effort I put into making it look spectacular. So my guy wasn’t surprised when he first realized it takes me two hours to wash, blow dry and style my hair for the day.

But there’s no way of bracing someone for the ruins I leave in my hair styling wake, and I can only hope my guy possesses a shop vac and industrial cleanser.

“What were you doing in here, trimming a yeti?”

I can’t say that I blame my guy for his astounded look as he surveyed his bathroom one morning. The writhing mass of broken red hair strands tangled around his drain, bath mat and cabinet counter looked more like tentacles than something from my head.

I could only shrug. There is a price to pay for repeated heat styling; I’m guessing my guy just didn’t expect to have to pay it in jugs of Drain-O or Swiffer refills.

(I’d rather not discuss the side effects of my color-depositing conditioner. I’m sure they’ll come up soon enough.)

The closer my guy and I get, the more my illusion of cool confidence cracks: He’s seen the backseat of my car, experienced the stench of two-day old unwashed dishes in my sink, and likely pulled errant strands of my hair out of canned vegetables.

Rather than let him bag me up and ship me to Ripley’s Odditorium, I figured I’d put my confirmed talents to use and try to find a way to one-up my guy. The answer: challenging him to a high stakes game of Scrabble. Enter over-inflated self confidence:

“It really is going to be sad to kick your ass,” I told my guy one night. “I’d hate to see you cry. You do know that words like “doggie” and “kitty” aren’t legal Scrabble words, right?”

He bantered back accordingly, but there was no stopping me. I may have even pat my guy on the head and done a preliminary winner’s dance around him. Which would have been fine if I had actually won the damn game.

Instead, after more than an hour of heated play (and, I admit, a few dirty tricks to distract him) I was forced to concede defeat to my guy, who played a far better game that I did. He was gracious enough to not gloat too much about the double digit point spread between us; I was composed enough to not flip the board onto the floor and stomp off to pout.

It was a stinging loss for a girl who makes her living off words, especially when all her words of late seem to be unfounded. Fortunately, my guy doesn’t see me as the bug-cowering, shedding Yeti loser that I do at times. To him, I’m still the smart woman who lets him show off his bug catching prowess and can keep him on his toes at all times, and I couldn’t be happier about that.

That hasn’t stopped him from insisting I call him Scrabble Master, of course, but I’m okay with that. He’s earned the title…. Until the rematch, that is.