I’ve always been stacked. I just woke up one morning at the age of 9, and — boom — I was already a B-cup. I was the first girl in my grammar school to get a bra, and the first to start drowning myself in large sweatshirts. It takes a little while to get used to that sort of thing. I swear I tilted for a few weeks. It wasn’t until my freshman year of college that I realized that, while my breasts were sometimes unwieldy, I was pretty glad to have them. I arrived at this moment of clarity during my first semester, when I attended a Thursday night happy hour wearing a tight white T-shirt and jeans. Where I formerly had been ignored, I was suddenly bestowed with drinks. (OK, Coors Light drafts, but you take what you can get when you’re 18.)

And so went my late teens and early 20s. Boys like breasts. Breasts get you things. Go, breasts, go. I got over the negative attention pretty quickly (“Hey, buddy, my eyes are up here.”), but I was always aware of their power. It’s a continuing fascination for me because that was the first time I got that kind of attention. No matter how many feminist tracts you read, you never forget what boys like.

Now I’m in my late 20s and while my breasts are still beautiful, they’ve started to lose their perk. That’s right, the girls are feeling a little down, a little tired, and are losing their battle with gravity. I don’t know how to deal with this exactly. Should I feel sad? Should I buy them a little nip and tuck on their birthday? A friend once told me, “No one judges mountains for shifting and changing, so why should they judge you?” Of course, he’s right — but every once in a while you need a little reassurance.

It’s particularly rough watching young Hollywood in action. I’m starting to take their perkiness personally. Jennifer Love Hewitt (or Jennifer “Love My Breasts” Hewitt as she’s often referred to) is a perfect example of someone genetically predisposed to make me feel like crap. Unless she had a little silicone help …

In the 1998 music video for her one and only single, “How Do I Deal?” (an enthralling piece that starred her then-19-year-old breasts), she wore a white tank top, and bounced around angrily in the rain, her breasts buoyant, large and damp. I remember watching it for the first time with my roommate, shaking my head, blinking my eyes, and then saying, “Oh, come on. Come on! She’s not wearing a bra. Goddammit, they just can’t be real. They can’t.”

My roommate just grinned at the television set. His head bounced ever so slightly to the rhythm. A small trail of drool formed on the corner of his mouth. I don’t think he cared either way — a nice rack is a nice rack, real or not. I, however, am one of those people who need to know if things are real: noses, eyes, hair color and especially breasts. I know it’s none of my business. I know it’s rude. I don’t care. I want to know. So when I had the opportunity to find out if Love’s best asset (surely it’s not her singing voice) were store-bought or homemade, I decided it was worth it to invest my time in a little research.

Last September, I was walking home to the East Village from my office in Soho. I took Bowery, and when I hit the corner of Third Street, I saw a camera crew setting up for the night. A man walked by me with a walkie-talkie, and I heard a voice crackle through, “Love and Jonathon are coming this way.”

Love? Wasn’t that Hewitt’s nickname?

My heart started pounding. Could it be? I walked around the corner from the crew and stole a peek at a director’s chair. Yep, it was true. The chair read: “Time Of Your Life,” Hewitt’s hourlong drama, which at the time had yet to debut in Fox. (It has ultimately done poorly in the ratings, and is, in fact, on hiatus. Renewal status is undetermined. Apparently a clear complexion and good posture can only take you so far in life.) This might be my chance to learn the truth! I was sticking around for this one.

I stood on the corner for a good 45 minutes and watched the activity. A truck drove by and sprayed water on the streets to create a post-rain appearance. Three 10-year-olds waited anxiously nearby clutching paper and pens, presumably for autographs. Their mother, who grasped the leash of a west highland terrier, tried to schmooze one of the production assistants, to no avail.

Hewitt was nowhere in sight.

How long could I wait to see those perky breasts? I mean, this was something I could tell my grandchildren about: I saw the perfect, perhaps cosmetically enhanced breasts of an aspiring superstar. At the same time, I had completed a 10-hour workday and was just plain tired.

Love my breasts, I began chanting internally. Touch them. Feel them. Love them.

PAs temporarily relocated me while they dismantled some boards they had mounted on the side of a building. The signs were plastered with posters and scrawled upon with graffiti to make them look all gritty and urban and shit. I found it amusing that they had to make a street corner in the East Village look gritty. There are plenty of places in New York City that need no decoration.

I chatted with one of the PAs, a younger guy, while he pulled down the posters. I told him I was there to see perfect breasts.

He said, “You really think they’re perfect?”

I said, “Perfect, cosmetically enhanced breasts.”

“Aw, that’s not fair,” he said. “The minute someone gets famous, they say, ‘She has fake breasts,’ or, ‘He’s gay.’”

I hadn’t the heart to tell him “they” were usually right. Instead I said, “Fair enough. Perfect breasts, then.”

“Well, actually, they’re not bad,” he said and laughed.

“I’m sure,” I said.

They cranked up some huge lights on either corner of Third, and then another set farther down towards Lafayette. People started to gather on the street corner. We all just stood around, waiting for something to happen. We could sense the impending presence of greatness, or some crap like that.

I chatted with a scruffy NYU student who was smoking a butt nearby.

“Are you here to see the breasts, too?” I said.

“I’m just chilling, taking a break. I don’t even know who it’s supposed to be.”

I explained that we were awaiting the arrival of an international pop singing sensation, television star and horror movie princess.

“Huh,” he said. “I don’t have a television set, so I don’t know who she is.”

And then I asked him to marry me. No, I didn’t do that, but I did smile at him warmly.

Finally she arrived and shot her scene, and wouldn’t you just know it? She wore a jacket. No breasts for this fan. No, not tonight.

I bid my compadre farewell and headed home. On Sixth Street, I ran into two of my co-workers, returning from their weekly volunteer session at an art program for homeless teens. They were glowing from their good efforts and intentions. I told them what I had witnessed, and they told me they had no idea who Hewitt was. I then realized, as I tend to do about once a day, that I was an asshole. They invited me to join them for a drink in Soho, but I declined and shuffled onward.

When I entered my apartment, I immediately went to the bathroom. I pulled up my shirt, camisole and bra, and stared at my breasts. I pinched my nipples until they were hard. I looked for a minute more, and then covered myself.

Perfect.

Trying to convince dad @JonHuntsman to run for mayor of NYC. Thoughts? #whynot?

— Abby Huntsman (@HuntsmanAbby) May 17, 2012

Why not? I mean sure he has never lived in New York and has no connection to the city, but why not?

Of course, now that this idea is floating around, very rich and well-connected morons just might set about trying very hard to make it a reality. Jon Huntsman is a creature of the sort of oblivious center-right rich folk who bankrolled the hilarious failed New York campaigns of Harold Ford Jr. and Reshma Saujani. They would like very much to see another one of their class be the mayor of their city, after Bloomberg ends his term (if he ends his term). The Republicans have essentially no candidate. (I still wouldn’t put it past Police Commissioner and professional harasser-of-minorities Ray Kelly to mount a run, but at the moment he’s sounding disinclined to.) And Jon Huntsman is the sort of nationally prominent “independent” candidate all three major New York newspapers would love (the Daily News would love him the most, obviously, but the Post would love him because he is secretly not actually that moderate).

Jon Huntsman — whose tax plan called for the complete elimination of taxes on capital gains and dividends, as well as the elimination of the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Reagan-era tax benefit for poor people that used to be the sole form of welfare that conservatives supported, and who also wholeheartedly supported the Paul Ryan plan to fix the deficit by eliminating Medicare and not making rich people pay taxes — was of course beloved by the press and labeled a reasonable moderate when he ran for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. He was mistaken for a political moderate primarily because he does not believe that God created cavemen and dinosaurs at the same time, roughly 4,000 years ago. Huntsman, who supports the complete repeal of Dodd-Frank and is strictly antiabortion and anti-gay marriage and anti-healthcare reform and pro-gun, is now essentially a symbol of the dignity and sagacity of the “radical center,” even though he is a conservative Republican.

So obviously New Yorkers would be thrilled to vote for this guy. I endorse this.

The Obama administration would also like the Bloomberg endorsement, and both campaigns are trying very hard to win the mayor’s support, as Michael Barbaro writes in the New York Times today.

But as his mayoral term winds down, he has told advisers that he is willing to back a candidate this time around, touching off an intense competition for his support in the general election.

“I’ll see down the road,” the mayor said coyly on Tuesday when asked about an endorsement. Describing his impressions of Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama, he made clear that he sees a wide gap between them. “They’re very different, and they give the public a real choice,” he said. “It’s hard to argue that you can’t tell the difference, if you will. They run the spectrum on lots of different issues.”

I would be surprised if Bloomberg ended up endorsing anyone. He loves the attention he receives as a potential endorser, but he cherishes his “non-partisan independent” label much more, and an endorsement of a major-party presidential candidate would sully his carefully maintained brand. He is leading both campaigns on, just as he did in 2008.

In 2007 and 2008, Obama tirelessly wooed Mayor Bloomberg, meeting with him multiple times and showering him with public praise, and he never received an endorsement. McCain also tried to win the mayor’s support to no avail. There was even (dumb) speculation about each campaign considering offering Bloomberg the running mate gig. Since Obama took office, he has continued attempting to win the mayor over, inviting him to golf and lunch at the White House and so on. When Bloomberg was running for his third term, in 2009, Obama did no campaigning for his Democratic opponent, Bill Thompson. (Though then-press secretary Robert Gibbs did allow, in a cagy response to a direct question, that the president “would support the Democratic nominee” in his position as “leader of the Democratic party.”) The mayor has returned the favor by repeatedly, quietly undermining Obama, dismissing him as arrogant to his good pal Rupert Murdoch and trashing Obama’s deficit reduction proposals as, you guessed it, class warfare.

The absurd thing is that there is, policy-wise, practically no daylight between Obama and Bloomberg. The president is a moderate Democrat who believes in the importance of deficit reduction and comprehensive tax reform. The mayor is a liberal Republican who believes the exact same thing. Both of them are “education reformers,” both want immigration reform, both support carbon emissions reduction, both are pro-choice, and the list goes on. They don’t agree on everything, of course. Bloomberg is more strictly anti-gun than the president, and openly supports gay marriage. You know, just like Mitt Romney.

The only reason Bloomberg would have, from a policy perspective, to back Romney over Obama would be over Dodd-Frank, which Bloomberg opposed, and Obama’s plan for a millionaire’s tax bracket, which Bloomberg thinks is a “silly” idea. But the mayor’s stated position is that all the Bush tax cuts should be allowed to expire, which is the opposite of the Republican position. His other disagreements with the president are solely about rhetoric — the mayor finds any whiff of economic populism or Democratic partisanship distasteful — and personality. Not that Mayor Bloomberg, the wise technocrat who always carefully weighs the evidence before making his rational decisions, would support a candidate whose entire platform is wildly at odds with Bloomberg’s stated positions, simply because the candidate is nicer to billionaires like Mayor Bloomberg. That would be absurd!

The White House’s attempts to win Bloomberg over seem to me perpetually doomed to failure, though I imagine they’ll continue to embarrass themselves seeking his support, as he continues flirting with Romney.

I asked her a few questions about “endangered local signage.”

How are you defining “Vernacular Typography”?

I guess it should technically be Vernacular “Lettering,” but I define Vernacular Typography as the found lettering that exists in the built environment and surrounds us everyday. It doesn’t have to be pretty or use an existing typeface, it’s just any visual representation of language.

How do you think New York City’s vernacular typography differs from other cities around the country and the world?

New York’s vernacular typography is unmatched in terms of intensity and variety of signage. On any given block, you can see the city’s forgotten history through the layers of still-visible signage in basically any medium. The typescape is also much denser than in other places because the city evolves so rapidly and retail turnover is so high.

Which New York City typefaces are your current favorites?

I’m partial to the type and signs I grew up seeing every day, most of which have disappeared (Gertel’s Bakery) or whose surfaces seem to be slowly melting away (Ideal Hosiery).

I love any type that somehow still clings to life or relates directly to a time and place (Horn & Hardart Automat).

And of course, you can never go wrong with beautiful neon (Montero’s).

What do we lose when the vernacular typography of the city streets vanishes from sight?

A sense of the city’s history, and also a precious visual resource. Typography can you tell you a lot about local culture and urban communication and when we don’t see it, our sense of the city is diminished.

What do you think might be the psychological impact of living in a city where the native typography is replaced by homogeneous corporate signage?

I think there’s less of a personal connection to a specific place. With standardized corporate advertising, signs are no longer representative of a group of people or a neighborhood, just a business that could be anywhere in the world.

For natives, connections to the past are lost, so a sense of home or a memory of a place is devalued. And for visitors, there’s less of the unique experience you get from traveling someplace new.

Vernacular typography is such an incredible marker of regional identity, spatial orientation and even personal history. If we lose it altogether, we not only lose that individual and cultural connection, but also a physical map of the city, which is why documentation and preservation are so important.

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But the NYPD’s “covertly follow every single Muslim in the tri-state area” approach to counter-terrorism has its defenders. Like Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who believes Americans Muslims have the right to worship wherever they see fit so long as they don’t pay any attention to the unmarked vans parked across the street.

And the department argues that it is allowed to carry out surveillance wherever it chooses, because there’s no law against just going around looking at things and taking some pictures, right? No, of course not, unless you look sort of Middle Eastern.

The NYPD earlier this week announced that they had totally caught some people who were almost definitely probably Iranian spies. These spies were caught red-handed spying all over the place!

Authorities have interviewed at least 13 people since 2005 with ties to Iran’s government who were seen taking pictures of New York City landmarks, a senior New York Police Department official said Wednesday.

The NYPD’s Mitchell Silber told Congress that Hezbollah and Iran definitely want to blow up New York, and the proof is three incidents of people “associated with the Iranian government” getting caught photographing things, in New York. (I am not much of a terrorist, but if you want pictures of New York City landmarks in order to figure out how best to blow them up why not try Flickr? There are hundreds of thousands of photos of every landmark in the city already online!)

While other so-called intelligence experts say ” there are no known or specific threats indicating Iranian plans to attack inside the U.S.,” Long Island-based Islamaphobe Republican Congressman Peter King and documented supporter of terrorism wants us all to be on high alert, because Hezbollah is everywhere:

Opening the hearing, King said, “We have a duty to prepare for the worst,” warning there may be hundreds of Hezbollah operatives in the United States, including 84 Iranian diplomats at the United Nations and in Washington who, “it must be presumed, are intelligence officers.”

Stop telling the NYPD not to spy on all the Muslims, everywhere! If they don’t keep tabs on all of them, the Iranians will get us!