I remember in high school, two girls walking around play rehearsal and, after placing their pinched fingers on our kneecaps, they opened up their hands, running the nails along each person’s leg. The result was a spine-tingling, delicious shiver, like the “crack an egg on your head” game from elementary school.

“That,” they proclaimed triumphantly, “is 1/10th of an orgasm.”

For the next 7 years, that was about as close as I could get to imagining an orgasm. As a sexual late-bloomer, I didn’t get kissed until I was 17, and as best I can figure, I was too busy fixating on the lack of kissing in my life to worry too much about sex or orgasms. If there was a way to stimulate kissing (autoerotic make-outs?) I would have been all over that. But I didn’t find myself dwelling on (or attempting to) masturbate much, before or after my first boyfriend.

Of course, with the boyfriend, there was a lot of wandering of mouths and hands, and eventually “going all the way.” Seventeen years of sexual frustration exploded in a few magic months, and while things quickly soured before we could even leave the blush of new love, I am grateful that I had an equally inexperienced partner to practice with and to learn on. Surprisingly, he knew more about female anatomy than me, thanks to internet-available pornography. While my own attempts at self-exploration yielded little more than a slightly satisfying feeling, akin to a good scratch on the back, he was able to focus in his fingers for a distinctly sexual- albeit intense- experience. As nice as I found this, I was pretty sure I wasn’t orgasming. I still wasn’t totally clear on the details, but I figured I’d know when it happened.

Sadly, with him it never did. However, he wanted it desperately, seemingly more than I did, so I did fake it. A lot. Like, two or three times in the span of an hour. If I regret anything from my first relationship, it might be that I let this poor boy loose into the world believing himself to have magic fingers. When things ended, I wasn’t too concerned. Easy come, easy go, even if the coming wasn’t so easy. I don’t think it ever occurred to me that he might remain my only boyfriend for the next six years.

Instead, in college, there was a spate of boys. Most of them were strangers (though not all), many of them I met at parties. One guy crashed my party, another guy asked me to dance when he found me looking for my friends at a bar. Another guy I had never spoken to outside of our seminar, until he asked me to his room one night, and I, high off of one of my first bong hits, agreed, only realizing when I got to his door why I was there. Exchange student or guy I met on vacation, they all had one thing in common: none of them made me come, either, and I was faking it for them, too. As differently as they all began, the scenes started playing the same once we were in bed: a boy’s fingers, working feverishly, everything feeling nice ,until the arch of my foot started to seize up painfully. I would try to push through, thinking it must be like the tension in the moment before a rubber band breaks, but I couldn’t do it. I always either pulled his hands away, or let out a small yelp of pleasure (“I just came!”) to go ahead and end things.

I didn’t see any point. I already knew it wouldn’t happen. I was broken. I figured that there were just some people out there- and I just might be one of them- who couldn’t come. I figured I was wired wrong, with some trigger connecting my vagina to the arch of my foot, or a missed connection in the central nervous system. I started blurting it out to female friends after a few beers, and most of them reacted in horror. For them, it would seem orgasming- either alone or with someone- was as easy as coaxing the cork out of a champagne bottle once you’ve figured it out.

“Wait,” a friend would gasp over a pitcher of light beer or boxed wine, “Not even by yourself?” By this point, I was trying, but rather infrequently. Going at it the only way I knew how- using the same rapid strokes of my former flames and hook-ups- i not surprisingly got the same result:  Tensed-up arches and tears.

Salvation came from an unexpected place. As a senior in college, I wrote and performed a monologue on faking orgasms with my first boyfriend. Hoping to keep the existence of such a piece buried, I asked that any publication of the monologue list me as the anonymous writer and performer of the piece. Nevertheless, my mother sussed it out, thanks to Facebook. She saw I was planning to attend an event. Well, what was it about? How are you involved?

“I’d rather not say,” I sputtered, but she coaxed it out of me.

“Ok. It’s a monologue. It’s about sex. You can see it if you want to, but you can never, ever, EVER say anything to dad about it.”

I agreed to send her the piece on those terms, and that was the last we ever mentioned of it, save one conversation in the car a month later.

“Are you still faking it?”

“Yes.”

“Have you tried going really slow? It always takes me a while.”

And god bless my mother for saying one of the most nakedly personal things she could ever say, because damnit if she wasn’t right. Later that week, I tried it, really tried it, going slow. Without the over-eager porno-trained fingers of drunken strangers, or my own ersatz impersonations, I tried going very, very slowly. And, at 21, I finally had my first orgasm. While I can say it reminds me absolutely nothing of having someone scratch your knee, I will say my initial suspicion at 17 was right- when you have one, you know.

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Ever noticed that refrigerators and cupboards are kind of like black holes for food? Chinese food boxes, small Tupperware containers with three leftover bites of that rockin’ lasagna you made and couldn’t throw out, jars of jelly and salsa and who knows what else, halves of lemons. Refrigerators are bad, but freezers and cupboards are worse. I seriously can go two years without taking a peek at the top shelf of my cupboard. And you know the food in the freezer isn’t about to rot, so why not let it sit there a little longer?

But, in honor of spring cleaning, here’s a double-duty project for you. Cleanse your kitchen and yourself! How, you ask? Why, let me tell you. One word.

Smoothies.

Yes, that’s right, smoothies are the answer to all your spring cleaning woes. Perfectly scrumdidilyumptious snacks, they allow you to throw all those odds and ends from your fridge and freezer and cupboard into your blender and tada! No more cans of pineapple lurking in your cupboard. Never again will you stumble upon a shriveling orange in the drawers of your fridge. And, smoothies can be jam-packed full of healthy goodness, giving your body and soul their own kind of spring cleaning.

Ingredients. Blender. You know what to do.

Try out the recipes below if you are so inspired, but the point is really to use what you’ve already got. So, fling open that fridge, pull out the blender, and get to your cleaning/smoothie drinking.

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