I FEEL NAKED WITH LIPSTICK

Rock-climbing Ricky says my blog needs some dog pictures. He has mentioned this twice now: once in writing ("I know what your blog needs: dog pictures.") and once in a follow-up conversation ("Did you post any dog pictures yet?").

I ignored him both times.

His deal is that my blog is too plain, too much of a template. I need an explanation of the blog's title at the top of the page, he says, and I need to customize it, add some pizazz, some lipstick, powder its nose, make it mine.

But I like things plain. My clothes, my house, my car, my life, my personality, my blog. The plainer the better. Plain as in "free from superficial embellishment." I'm not Amish or anything. Just very boring. And I don't like to dust around a bunch of knickknacks. And I don't like "accessories," like jewelry and scarves and belts and purses and such. The only accessorizing I do is occasionally I'll match my bra to my underwear, but only if I think someone might see them both at the same time.

I did try to put a picture of plain-spoken Benjie on this blog, from New Year's, but it kept crashing my computer. So I gave up. I wasn't doing it to dress up my blog really, but to watch Benjie look in the mirror, as it were. He would have said stuff like, "Why did you pick THAT picture? Oh my gosh, my hair was not cute AT ALL that day." or "My nostrils look like canyons." or "Do you think my eyes are more aqua or teal in this light?" or "God, I looked SO AWESOME that night." It's not that he's vainer than anyone else, he's just more honest; he's not vain about his own vanity. If he had a facelift, he'd proudly show off his puffy bruises and bandages and gloat about how handsome he was about to be — unlike a former co-worker who tried to explain away the black-and-blue and newfound tightness by saying she had some sort of "brain thing" and just woke up that way. But Benjie would never get a facelift. He's going to grow old gracefully with me (although I'll continue to dye my hair pink and lie about my age, and Benjie will continue to wear shoes made for 20-year-old lesbians). We'll have adjacent rooms in the Newton Nursing Home, where his wife, Erin, will come feed us twice a day and settle disputes over word pronunciation.

Ben and Erin, if you haven't gathered, are two of my main niggas. (I'm picking up some new vocabulary listening to Wu-Tang Clan. Including the phrase "Survey says: You dead," which is something you'd say to a nigga you're about to pop. It's an expression that relies — brilliantly — on "Family Feud" for its poetry).

So, anyway, there's the issue of I don't know how to post a picture.

Then there's the issue of I don't know whether Ricky was serious about the dog pictures. As I was looking at some dog pictures, it dawned on me that perhaps he was being facetious, as in "What this car really needs is a yellow magnetic ribbon that says 'Support our Troops.'"

So I really need to sort out what he was getting at, and then, if he was serious, maybe he could come over and show me how to post a picture of a dog.

I need a nickname for Ricky. The Last Marxist is perfect, except it's already taken, and Marx seems too conservative for my little rock rat. So I've settled upon The Last Feminist — with a nod to Katha Pollitt, of course. Or wait. Last Feminista. That's better. More revolutionary sounding. Like SANDINISTA! Or ZAPATISTA! Or FASHIONISTA! FEMINISTA! And it's so fitting. The man does not have a sexist bone in his body. I kid you not. I say and think more disparaging things about women in a single day than he has said or thought his whole life.

What I'd really like to do is get some mirrors for this blog. And sometimes they'd be there and sometimes they wouldn't.