vulnerable

\VUL-nuh-ruh-bul\

adjective

1: capable of being physically or emotionally wounded
2: open to attack or damage : assailable

When my friend Julie and I were in college, we had a lot of boy drama. There were many afternoons spent in the front seats of my Nissan Sentra, parked in a crowded lot behind Rhode Island College, me with a mug of earl grey (some things never change), her with a diet coke (also unchanging), overanalyzing whatever confusing thing some given boy had said to either of us, pausing every once in a while for me to say, Okay, I really have to do some work now, seriously.

One of the rules we had in all of our rants was never to use the word VULNERABLE. We both believed the V-word was a self-fulfilling prophecy—if you said it, you were it.

The hilarity of those moments is that everyone is VULNERABLE, whether you say it or not. And it's totally subjective—points of attack are as diverse as the current selection of frozen dinners in the freezer aisle of your local grocer (choice is a serious issue in our culture, but I digress...).

It's something to take comfort in, you know, being human. As much as I hate to accept it, I suppose we're all in the same boat.

And need I remind the reader that velociraptors never attack the same spot of the electric fence more than once.

Clever.