I think most of us would say that we exercise for our health; for robust hearts and bellows-like lungs, big strong bones and big strong muscles that help us kick ass and take names. But I think a secret reason people exercise that we dislike talking about--because it makes us look vain, as if we don't care about our health, as if we are buying into the beauty ideal that we ought to be kicking to the curb--is that we exercise to look better. Especially naked. I submit this: there's not a thing in the world wrong with that.

The first meal I ever cooked for Esteban was a re-creation of my mother's spaghetti sauce. It was, well, kind of a disaster, in a wacky hijinx kind of sitcom way. One of the first meals he ever made for me involved an enormous pot of overcooked spiral pasta, ground beef and so much Kitchen Bouquet that the entire thing tasted like industrial sludge.

Since then, we've gotten a lot better in the kitchen and Esteban has absolutely perfected several dishes, so I leave all manner of Italian or tomato-based dishes to him, because his ragu sauce is unbelievably amazing. Bonus: unlike me, he never ever messes up the angel hair pasta. He doesn't follow recipes, so each batch is a new discovery, a little unpredictable and sometimes widely varying, depending on what we have in the house. Sometimes he uses portobello mushrooms, sautéed in garlic, olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Sometimes he throws vodka or whiskey into the sauce, sometimes there's tofu instead of meat. Sometimes he cooks pepperoni until it has the consistency of crispy bacon and then crumbles it into the sauce for these little spicy flavor bombs that make my mouth happy. You never know what you're going to get, but sometimes, like last week, his 7-quart batch is so amazing that I eat nothing else until it is gone and then go to the store to buy more ground round and tomato sauce so that he can turn around and do it again.

Kim, last week, was talking about the embarrassing moments we have in the gym, and unsurprisingly, a couple of those involved the noises our beautiful, natural, pain-in-the-ass bodies make. They're terrible and embarrassing in public, but when you get private, when you're naked, why does that seem so much worse?

aries (Mar. 21st-Apr. 20th)
Don't settle for second best when it comes to a relationship. But don't be like those psycho parents who coach their kid's softball team and put so much pressure on them that it takes all the fun out of the game and they just end up crying or wetting their pants. Find a happy medium.

taurus (Apr. 21st-May 20th)
You will be very powerful this week, like Flash Gordon . . . or should we say Flesh Gordon? Use your power for good.

Remember what it was like to be a virgin? Worrying if it would hurt? Practicing on your pillow case? Watching that scene in Dirty Dancing where Patrick Swayze gets out of bed and for .004 seconds, you can see it? I don't know that I'd want to be a virgin anymore, actually. But if you so desire, supposedly you can get an illusion of your innocence back, in the form of a liquid maidenhead. Because so many of us have such great memories of the sexual satisfaction achieved during our first time!

I don't know about you, but my first time, we were trying to be super quiet so that we wouldn't wake up his parents on the other side of the house. He tried to put in a CD to camouflage any sounds of our teenage coital attempts, but I basically issued an ultimatum and refused to lose my virginity to the mellow sounds of Def Leppard.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think I'd rather do kegels during boring conference calls. What do you think? The comments want to hear all about your first time.

Do you remember this Oscar dress Gwyneth Paltrow wore? This image is burned into my head. I recall thinking, when I first saw it, that flashing your tits at a red carpet, formal event was probably not the classiest thing in the world to do, but I figured when you're beautiful and have a nice rack, you're going to be into showing it around town. That kind of bodaciousness should be shared with the world.

Here's why I really remember the whole thing: the next day, in the Oscar fashion roundups, the vitriol poured on her pretty blonde head. Not because she was wearing something a little trashy--though that came up, of course--but because she was not wearing a bra, and her breasts looked saggy. Saggy! They were calling a pair of small, well-formed perfectly natural breasts saggy because they were not rack-and-pinnioned and plumped and hauled up underneath her chin, the way they are, apparently, supposed to be.

I'm moving in a few weeks, and I've been going through my stuff, as is traditional, to toss anything I don't need or use or wear or want, because moving giant boxes is bad enough when they're filled with actual useful items. It is insulting to move books you hate and broken pans and stretched-out T-shirts. I am sure I have a ton of junk hiding in my office and my kitchen and scattered across my living room, but I realized, going through my closet and my dresser, that I don't have any of those stretched-out, ratty T-shirts. I don't appear to own anything I don't wear--it is a miracle! But I also don't have any of the kind of comfy, casual, flop around the house clothes that straddle the border between street clothes and pajamas.

At my heaviest, that was all I wore. I never put on jeans because they constricted. I wore big sweaters that came down to my knees, and long skirts and I even left the house a few times in an L.L. Bean nightgown that I told myself looked exactly like a T-shirt dress except that it really looked like was an ankle-length nightgown, and what I really looked like is someone who had given up and didn't care and would shower in a down coat because she hated her body so much and couldn't stand to have anyone look at it, including herself.

How to stuff a wild bikini, and other hot-weather horoscopes:

aries (Mar. 21st-Apr. 20th)
It's a great weekend at the beach with friends, new and old. As night falls, your sun-kissed skin burns, the air cools and the wind picks up a bit. After cooking veggie burgers and dogs on the back patio grill and putting back a few gin & tonics with lime, a bunch of you stray back to the beach in the dark. All it takes is one exhibitionistic friend, and suddenly the gang is stripping--white asses disappearing into the black water. You hesitate, then throw caution to the wind and drop trou. The fleeting embarrassment is worth this feeling of refreshing liquid in new places. Later, you end up making out under the stars with someone you'd least expect. This has been a metaphor for your week--jump in.

Do you know how many things you could do wrong in bed? According to a survey by Clitical, as reported by Anne Sexton, a woman can make up to 20 faux pas in bed. Twenty things you have to avoid doing, for fear of terrible failure while you're naked. It takes enough regular, every day confidence and bravery to be naked in front of another person--now you know exactly how much more you have to muster up, in order to make sure you are not mocked while you are naked, which pretty much ranks as the very number one worst time in anyone's life to be mocked or feel stupid.

There's enough to worry about, when you have stripped down and are contorting yourself into any number of potentially embarrassing positions; do we really need to have had this survey taken, a checklist handily provided for us to tick down obsessively when we should be concentrating on how good our bodies feel and how well they work and how wonderful it is to not just be weird floating heads. Just the idea had already gotten my blood pressure up, until I clicked through to the (apparently heterosexually-focused) list, and found that men were complaining, in fact, about the same things that have troubled me for a long time.

We're built, as humans, to choose an ideal--this is the ideal job, this is the ideal partner, this is the ideal car and house and life, and this is what we need to aspire to. Ideals make me tired. They so often are an unattainable extreme, raising the bar to such an impossible height that ordinary human beings--perfectly wonderful, perfectly average people--end up breaking their necks when they try to scale those heights. Average is a bad word, and perfection is something that is not just nice to achieve, but something to which we are supposed to dedicate ourselves.