Leaving Mojo: n. 1. an individual’s heightened ability to attract the opposite sex, or an individual’s general willingness to take romantic risks, due to his/her imminent departure from a town, city or region.

Sitting in my rusted out ’89 Toyota Camry, chain smoking and swilling from a bottle of non-celebratory champagne I contemplated the lyrics to an old jazz standard, “You can’t have a dream and cut it to fit.” I wasn’t planning on driving — I was smashed — but I had to smoke in my car because it was too cold to smoke outside and I was living in a mad woman’s attic, so I was not allowed to smoke inside. The reason that I was living in the attic of an elderly woman — a very Dickensian moment of my life — was that I had arrived in Milwaukee with four dollars. My choices amounted to living out of my car for a week until my ballet contract started or living with an old woman who was so lonely that she would let a stranger — me — live in her house rent free for a week.

I was fired from a rather prominent ballet company (for anonymity’s sake let’s call it the “Northern Ballet”) for having a “sloppy fifth.” In the process of being fired, I contritely sat on the director’s couch, which was really a hard-backed chair, and grappled with the pressing question of whether his spectacles were hexagonal or pentagonal. Such a pedantic interest in the geometric intricacies of eyewear, in addition to my getting frequently fired, ought to have alerted me to the fact that I was in the wrong profession, but I remained blissfully unaware.

My Auntie B liked to refer to anti-depressants as “pack-up-your-troubles-pills,” and regarded the quest for “balance” and “happiness” with unabated derision. When I went to visit her in Shrewsbury, England, fresh-faced and 14 years old, she admonished me for trying to clean her kitchen. She liked it the way it was: filthy, disorganized and pungent with that oh-so English smell of mildew, old-people and slightly rotten vegetables. She regarded my enthusiasm for cleanliness with stern disapproval, and rarely called me by name, but instead referred to me as Polly-bloody-Anna.

This Christmas I went to South Africa to do the whole roots thing, only to find that mine are twisted, gnarled and thorny. There’s not a lot of pride I can have in my ancestry as a white South African. Both of my parents were born and raised in South Africa, and my mom’s side of the family immigrated to the country five or six generations ago. This means that my ancestors were stealing land, diamonds and various kinds of resources. But the reality is, if you’re white, yours probably were too.

So, I have this overwhelming guilt as a liberal, middle-class, educated white person … and as if the guilt couldn’t get any worse, just add the fact that I am a white South African into the mix, and I may as well smother myself with a pillow from my armchair-liberal’s armchair.

I feel really disillusioned that Stephen Colbert is a fictional character — that he plays a person named Stephen Colbert on TV, which is different from the private Stephen Colbert … Oh, don’t we all create fictions of ourselves, tra-la-la … The difference is that he has made a substantial amount of money doing it. Bravo, Stephen!

You can live in L.A. and be a perfectly respectably dressed individual without ever owning a pair of dark socks. Well, actually this might not be entirely true for businessmen, but as a lady, the combination of fabulous weather and decadent style render dark socks utterly useless. You know what dark socks mean: sensible shoes. Sensible shoes are taboo in the greater Los Angelean area — unless you are a Caltech graduate student.

When I left for the East Coast upon my admittance to Cornell, my brother warned me not to become a “dark sockser,” i.e. someone who would deign to wear dark socks. I heeded his advice for the better part of two years, struggling up and down the rocky Ithacan terrain in tottering and inexcusably impractical shoes. I had yet to join the dark-sock-side.

For those of you who are a little foggy on what Tao means exactly, this column is pretty much about what I’ve learned from my dog, Barnaby (a ruby-colored Cavalier King Charles Spaniel) but I deemed that too unsophisticated for a column title.

I heard a rumor that part of the 12-step program is that you can only have a (romantic) relationship with another person if you can first keep a plant alive for some substantial period of time and then keep a pet alive. So, I tried to do a little research on this urban myth and came across a whole bunch of 12-step literature, which basically espouse the importance of God. I had no idea that the fundamentalists got ahold of the winos — it hardly seems fair to force feed religion when someone is recovering from a serious addiction.