Melissa Petro

My relationship with my father was never father-daughter picnics. Maybe when I was very little — or maybe this is less a memory and more of a wish — I have an image of myself as a very little girl sitting on my father’s lap, and we are both laughing. Perhaps my father enjoyed fatherhood when his children were very little, but that joy seemed to curdle into constant frustration as my brother and I grew up.

After gaining as much as forty pounds and pushing a cantaloupe out my vagina, I wondered: will my body ever be the same?

You may have heard the old joke that 98% of people masturbate, and the other two percent are lying.

Guys, stop eating instant noodles. Seriously, they found lead in them. LEAD. Besides this, our stomachs can not digest them.

There was nothing easy about recovery, but it helped that living the trainwreck lifestyle had stripped me of everything. Within sixteen months, I was unemployed with no job prospects, barely scraping through my last semester at school. I was drinking every day. Sex with classmates had led to casual encounters which bottomed out at trading sex for cash, something I spent a whole lot of time justifying.

The quickest way to reveal yourself as a douchenozzle — not to mention unoriginal — is to remind someone who’s about to get married that most marriages end in divorce. The second-quickest way to offend is tell us what our wedding has to be like or whom we need to invite.

Use insect repellent, sleep under a mosquito net, and just don’t get pregnant — is this the best we can do for Latin American women?

“If someone’s crying at work, it’s because it’s their only outlet to release tension,” says Greg, age 30, a public school teacher. When people cry at work, Greg says, it’s because they’ve became “overwhelmed” or perhaps feel as if “they’re not meeting their goals.”

Sure, "friends forever" sounds nice. In theory. But sometimes it's better that two people just not be friends.

A week or so ago I started shopping for a wedding dress, and guess what? Shopping for a wedding dress sucks!