Faster Than Kudzu

The Sad Sad Suicide of Beauty

Sometimes, when I do a book club visit, they get me a little SOMETHING to remember them by. It’s often chocolate, which I used to eat, I remember, back in the beautiful misty yesterday before I realized I couldn’t fit in any of my PANTS and had to stop, you know, eating things that taste good in favor of highly nutritive sawdust and herbal supplements… Now I feed the chocolate to my children who have taken to asking, all casual like, “Got any book clubs scheduled, Mom?” with Sugar Avarice shining lamp-like in their eyes.

Sometimes it is wine, which, all I have to say about THAT is, YAY! The last one I went to got me a very UNUSUAL little something, a charming and unexpected never-before-given thing, but alas! It made my heart quail with mingled love and terror.

It was a pot of Gerber Daisies. ALIVE ones. With ROOTS.

This book club did not know two things:

Thing one is, Gerber daisies are my favorite flower IN THE UNIVERSE. I love the shape, the rich fall-like colors, the cheerful wide roundness of their open faces surrounded by the petals. OH! OH! LOVE! I am not a BEAUTY OF THE EARTH flower type person, but Gerber Daisies speak to me, and they always have---Tulips, too, for some reason. When people send me daisies or tulips, my kitchen is a happy place for days, and I tend to warble while I do the dishes.
But. Thing two is….I kill plants.

Plants, in fact, secretly call me Sweeny Joshilyn, the Demon Gardener of Death Street, and when I take a wrong turn and accidentally walk through the garden section of Home Depot, all the little pots of flowering perennials begin to pray fervently to their green and rooty gods, “Please, please,” they pray, “Let the killer pass on by. Not me. OH PLEASE NOT ME.” Because if I do INSANELY decide to buy a plant, that plant’s days are numbered, and its death will be black spotted and slimy and excrutiating.

So I am given this POOR DOOMED blooming gerbera by a well meaning book club, and normally when some sad plant is foolishly handed over into my protection, I gamely take a run at it, and it slowly and agonizingly dies, and then I put the pot in the shed and shrug. But, see, THIS WAS GERBER DAISIES. And I LOVE them in a way I am never going to love, like, the usual household ferns or waxy leaved whatnots. And I didn’t even know Gerbers CAME potted, and that you could have them, ALIVE AND GORGEOUS, cheering one’s house up much longer than CUT ones, which die in a few days.

SO! I got this insane idea. SELF! I said to myself. SELF! You are going to take care of this plant properly and YOUR FRIEND THE GOOGLE will tell you how to make it thrive and be beautiful forever,

Heh.

Let me just tell you, the only plant I ever managed to keep for more than a few weeks was this HARDY little cactus I got back in college. I was SO charmed by its inability to be killed by me that I moved it with me from Florida to Athens to Atlanta back to Florida and then to Chicago. In Chicago, Scott picked up its little pot and looked at it, and I waxed rhapsodotic about how I had managed to keep it alive and its name was Rexy and we had traveled lo half the country together, and blah blah etc and how once I had even accidentally STORED it in a U BOXIT SHED for a few a weeks and STILL it clung to life, looking exactly the same as it had when I got it.

He gave me pitying eyebrows.

Him: Don’t you think that’s a little odd, that it looks exactly the same as when you got it? I mean, considering that that was more than six years ago?
Me: What do you mean?
Him: I mean, six years, and it is still in this same tiny starter pot. No changes at all, really?
Me: Oh. You think I have stunted it?
Him: *gently* No. No. Not stunted it, per se. It’s a little, um….fossilized.

So I came over and gave it a HARD pinch and it…crumbled. Into little rocky dusts. So. Yeah.

BUT this time, I was sure, it would all be different because I do not LOVE cactuses like I LOVE gerber daisies.

So things have gone well for a few weeks. And then TODAY the blooms looked a little…droopy. They looked down sadly at the tabletop instead of facing me. And so I said to it (THE GOOGLE says it is good to talk to plants) I said to it, “YOU need a speck of lovely morning sunshine!” And I put it out on the back deck in the middle fo my big table.

UNFORTUNATELY, while it sat outside and I took Maisy to preschool, something mysterious happened. I cannot figure it out. I THINK the climbing rose bush by the stairs must have told the Gerber EXACTLY who now owned it, and the Gerber, fearing its impending long slow torturous demise, just….exploded. Blew itself to smithereens. Suicided using the methane from passing cow toots or borrowed dynamite from the monkey grass. That must be what happened, because I can’t figure out any other explanation for THIS….

Quintessential Random

Yesterday afternoon, I headed out with Sam to endure Eragon, his reward for reading the entire 500 page book….he’s nine so that’s a pretty impressive read. I KNOW he actually read it, too, because he had to tell me in excruciating detail exactly how the book differed from the movie. There were manymanymany ways in which they differed. Many.

If you are a nine year old boy hoping for a lot of fantastical magic-based violence and no kissing, it is the best movie ever made. Period. If you are not a nine year old boy, it’s…probably not. I enjoyed it, but I shamelessly enjoyed Conan the Barbarian, Dragonslayer, and even Krull. So. Grain of salt. Even from a seasoned geek like me, the movie gets only a moderately cool thumb up, but I will break out TWO BIG FAT THUMBS WAY UP for the the big Smoke Dragon fight at the end.

ANYWAY. I was getting ready to leave with Sam for the movie and before heading out, I engaged in the following smatter of loving dialog with Mr. Husband.

Scott: I am going to run to Target while you are at the movie. Need anything?
Me: Izze pomegranate soda.
Him: Okay.
Me: Taking Maisy with you?
Him: *looks at me like I am being a nougat-head* As opposed to…
Me: Oh, I don’t know. You could tape her to something…
Him: Like the cat?
Me: Well, you COULD tape her to the cat but I would prefer you to tape her to something stable. Like the wall. Or this bannister.
Him: I suppose I could tape her to you.
Me: Nah. The movie will scare her.
Him: Yeah. Plus you already specified something stable.

AH hahahaha! He is so witty. Or he was so witty. Right up until I killed him and ate him.

Actually I did not kill him OR eat him. Mostly because Scott may have had a POINT in not taping Maisy to me. I am NOT particularly stable right now. I am sleep deprived and working to a schedule that can ONLY BE DESCRIBED as DROOLINGLY INSANE.

To Wit: I go to bed at 8 PM, same time as Miss Maisy. I get up ---no alarm, just pop up---somewhere between 1 am and 2am. I work on the book and maybe blog until somewhere between 4 am and 6 am. Then I go back to bed and nap for an hour or two. It’s crazy but it’s EFFECTIVE. I am liking the book more and more as I work in these small dead hours that belong to me and the cat alone.

The score right now is Book, 3, Mental Health, um, ZERO, but with a deadline looming February, I accept this as reasonable.

Apropos of nothing except the state of my union (the one between my left and right brain hemispheres, I mean, not my marriage) yesterday morning in church, we had a guest preacher, and I was ----well. Not stable. I was note passing like a naughty Tween, even though, evil as I have been recently, I probably could have stood to get a good scoop of preaching.

Me *writing along the edge of the announcements*: If we got a NICE BIGGISH DOG! We could cancel our security system. Because the dog would kill all the murderers that come trooping through.
Him: Yeah, and if we named the dog ACKERMAN, we could leave the security signs up in the yard and they would still be true.
Me: THAT IS BRIL! Can Ackerman be a LABRADOODLE?
Him: I was kidding.
Me: Oh.

I tried to listen to the sermon, and it was about how we are lambs; and how when we get lost, God leaves all his flocks and comes to find just US because our relationship with God is personal.

The preacher said, “God calls you back by NAME.”

And Scott passed me a note that said, “Sometimes I think I am the lamb that God calls “Dumb - - -.”

He really did the little LINES like that, not wanting, I suppose, to write the word “ass” on our church bulletin that we would most likely forget and leave in the pew covered with arguments pro (me) and con (him) LABRADOODLE and very little that could be considered Godly or even decently human.

Which really, don’t you think I NEED A DOG, right at this moment? RIGHT NOW? With the yard still not fenced and with a BIZARRE work schedule that is BOUND to lead to mental sleep dysphasia syndrome? I just made that syndrome up but I SUSPECT…

1) ...it causes one to eat hydrogenated-oil-filled-foods and then get one’s son’s super soaker water gun and fill it with unsweetened blue raspberry Kool-Aid and climb up a water tower to spray anyone wearing white on the theory that it is definitely AFTER Labor Day.

And

2) ...they already have a drug for it. And an obnoxious commercial for the drug that will tell you to please self diagnose and then ask your doc about the SPECIFIC drug you think you need because hey, they probably OWN your doctor and if you come in and ASK for it he will certainly scribble it on a pad for you. The commercial will tell you in great detail exactly what symptoms you need to trot out for your doc to give you the drug (“I can’t stop with the Twinkies, and even though I KNOW the fashion industry INVENTED WINTER WHITE a while back, I can’t help feel a helpless wash of blue tinged rage whenever I see someone wearing it in JANUARY...")

PS: The drug probably will wreck your liver and cause sexual dysfunction, but luckily, there are pills for THAT too.

Do I have to say the disclaimer? You know the one, about how I KNOW there are actually sick people who actually need drugs and that my issue isn’t with medicine but with COMMERCIALS that hawk pills like they were shiny red scooters? I don’t have to do that HERE, right?

The commercials work though--- someone is even buying all that CIALIS from the people who can’t spell the word “YOU” but who never the less think they are qualified to supply me with many fine prescription medications and who send me 50 – 100 emails every dern day to tell me so. I know the e-mails MUST be effective marketing to SOMEONE, because Viagra is being gobbled up by all kinds of guys, many of whom no more have “ED” than I have mental sleep dysphasia syndrome. Except I may have that. SO they no more have “ED” than I have… a Labradoodle. Named Ackerman.

I saw it on Scrubs, which is TELEVISION! So you KNOW it’s true. Plus then I risked all manner of truly creepy pR0n to GOOGLE it---the things I do for you! I must TRULY love you!--- But hidden in the festival of resulting ick, I found a slightly more credible source for the increased recreational use of Mr. Happy Pill----USA Today.

Some dark days, right about 4 am, the only thing that can make a girl feel cheerful about the state of the world is one of these…

What the Cat Was or Will Be

Or is. I’m not sure how to verb it, as the topic is the cat’s Halloween costume. It is not yet Halloween. Even so, here is the cat, already in his.

Schubert (aka The Cat) has a DRY SKIN problem, and as the seasons change --- especially summer to fall ---- he gets itchy and unhappy under his pelt of long luxurious brown hair. The fix is usually a soothing dip and shot of steroids, but when I took him this year...

HE WAS NOT VERY HAPPY. I could up the font size on the previous sentence a good ten points and STILL it would be understatement. Schubert is….strongwilled. I once tried to transport him in one of those CARDBOARD cat-porters the vet gives out, and midway through the drive he DUG AND TORE a big rip in the SIDE of it, and RIPPED his way out, screaming feline obscenities.

If you’ve read Between---that scene where the dog gets OUT through the fence crack? I used the memory of how Schubert looked tearing his way into the world like Yeat’s Rough Beast. Once loose, he rocketed around and around the car like a brown blur of fury and plague, rending people and upholstery, releasing a thick cloud of panic fur into the air so that we could hardly see out the windshield…

After THAT, I went and bought a reinforced plastic MAXIMUM SECURITY PRISON thing that has METAL SCREWS and a locking porthole gate. It is obviously a jailhouse vehicle for the transport of criminally insane miscreant cats, but it’s called something perky (I forget—something like “The HAPPY KITTY KARRY KASE) and that is SO inappropriate. It’s like calling an Iron Maiden “Mr. Happy Fun Box.”

Getting Schubert INTO the HKKK means blood will be shed (mine) and eardrums will be burst (also mine) as he calls upon Father Tiger to loose a dark ancestral jungle curse upon the world. We only do it once a year, combining his skin treatment with his booster shots. SO An hour after I hurled the Happy Kitty Karry Kase through the vet door and fled from the demonic yowling that came ceaselessly from the box’s confines, I got a call from the veterinary assistant.

Her: Um, Joshilyn? I think we need to SHAVE Schubert. I see you clipped his back already, so we can even that out, and…His belly fur has gotten matted and snarled up and the dip can’t penetrate.
Me: I know. I can’t really brush his stomach. He doesn’t care to have it touched.
Her: *In a firm tone* Well, whether he cares to have it touched or not, it has to be done.

This is the same tone she uses when she tells me he is too dern fat. I KNOW, OKAY.
He is OBSCENELY fat.
I squirm in humiliation every time, convicted of cat abuse via overfeeding, and I say “But he BEGS.”
And she gives me a look that contains the elements of that same STERN tone and says circumspect things that imply, “YOU ARE THE HUMAN HE CANNOT POUR HIS OWN KIBBLE YOU MADE HIM FAT AND YOU WILL ONE DAY GO TO HELL FOR IT THIS IS WHAT WILL PUT YOU INTO HELL.”

I sink lower than worm bellies and whine and cringe and grovel apologetically.
But he pokes me with his TOE, I say. I work from HOME and he comes into my home office with his DREADFUL TOE and pokes and pokes me until I feed him.
Then she says, So shut your office door.
I say, He can open it. Same toe. It is prehensile. And evil. You don’t know how strong willed he is. He BENDS me. He BREAKS MY SPIRIT. He MAKES me feed him.

She has NEVER bought it and I get the YOUR CAT IS FAT AND YOU ARE BAD lecture every time I take him in. WHICH I DESERVE because he IS fat and I AM bad, but Lord, He wins. Call me spineless, if you like --- she certainly does. BUT HE WINS.

So she calls and wants to shave him.

Me: I don’t think he will like that.
Her: Well, whether he likes it or not, it should be done
Me: Good luck.

Not an hour later she called back, asking for permission to sedate him. He WOULD NOT let the entire vet team subdue him enough to get him shaved, even with a cat muzzle. They tried wrapping. He tore through. When she called back she sounded breathless and iron deficient, as if she had recently lost a lot of blood. I asked how bad it was, and she said, “Well…let’s just say he tore the vet up a little bit.”

SO they put him out and shaved him and dipped him and shot him up and OH MY LORD but you should SEE this poor thing. It still has Schubert’s one-eyed ornery head on the front end, but after that---there’s this sort of PACKED FAT TUBE of a body, like a walrus body, with four stumpy skinny legs that hold it up, and they left a PUFF of his LONG LONG hair on the end of his tail. Like a POODLE tail. He looks like….a cat-headed poodle walrus. In fact, that is what he is going to be for Halloween, and I am going to eat all the mini chocolate bars he collects.

BY THE WAY! When I picked him up? After he “Tore up the vet a little bit?” First time I have ever NOT gotten the lecture. Our talk went something like this…

Her: You should put him on a diet.
Me: I know. But he doesn’t really LIKE to be on a diet.
Her: *Deep breath* Yeah. He’s very…strong-willed.

Lady, you don’t know the half…

Betweening

On the way to my son’s school, there are yard chickens.

Not regular red or white hens, either. These are more the kind of chickens you see at the county fair. FANCY chickens. There are TWO roosters (I thought you could only have one????) Both are strutty, and their backs and necks are glossy and golden. They have speckled sides and their green tail feathers puff up in an extravagant bouffant, crowned by foot long swooping feathers that shimmer like iridescent taffeta.

Most of the hens are those meticulously speckled black and whites that look too uniform to be Jackson Pollack. More like, 70’s WALLPAPER chickens, high contrast and so closely and evenly patterned they can give a girl flashbacks. There is also at least one blindingly white pinheaded chicken who is very skinny-necked and sleek. She has a huge tail that comes out the back all higgledy piggedly like a feathery Butt-splosion.

It doesn’t seem like the sort of house that would have yard chickens. It’s one of those mini-McMansions---you know the kind. One side brick, bay window, deck in the back. It says, “Hello, you are now officially in the suburbs.” And yet, and yet….yard chickens. It gives me hope as I look at the small Georgia town we moved to a decade ago. A little hope. Because I also see two Super-Walmarts and 15 housing development signs on every street corner. Atlanta is eating us.

We lost out Mexican-Thai restaurant this last year, the only place in America where you could go in and order Tom Ka Gai and a taco. It couldn’t compete with Chili’s and the Noodle Bar. Granted, there’s a Taco Bell in our miniscule downtown, and you can get a Pizza Hut Personal Pan Pizza there, and if THAT doesn’t make you go HMMM ….but that is somehow not the same.

But as long as there are yard chickens I may hang on here for a little. See what happens. There aren’t a lot left. My friend Julie used to go biking down what is now a main thoroughfair, back when it was newly paved, and there was PACK of red hens and little Weiner dogs all mixed in together that lived in the front yard. They'd chase her bike from one end of the yard to the other, some barking and some releasing outraged, piercing clucks. Attack Chickens, Julie called them. They are gone, and they have taken all their weiner dogs with them.

The man who sat out on his front porch, shirtless, wearing overalls, and asked Sam to touch his piglet (and he was, thank God, holding a piglet when he said it) packed up and moved farther out into the wilds of Paulding county. The Sam-touched piglet has long been sausage, and now no new piglet will come to our neighborhood.

I’m sad about that.

We have good friends here and a good church, but as I watch more and more mini malls take over the fields between us and Hiram, more and more trees are bulldozered so 350K same-same-allsame houses can stick up like thumbs on the barren landscape with two bulimic option-package saplings flanking the uniform brick porches….I keep thinking, “No one is going to like it if I put goats in my backyard.”

And what’s the POINT, I ask you, of living outside the city then? The city is where the good theatre is and the only place to get decent Tapas and go to literary events and in the city I can find the kind of bar that knows how to make a chocolate covered cherry martini without resorting to squirting Hershey’s syrup and some Maraschino juice into tepid Vodka, and REALLY, I am SERIOUSLY asking you, what is the POINT of being AWAY from all that, if you can’t put GOATS in your BACK YARD?

I love the city. I love the rural South. I’m just not sure I love whatever it is we are living in now.

Contestual Memehood

Today I got tagged for a pretty dern cool meme, but oh my best beloveds I have had a DAY. Meme me no memes. YA'LL meme it up in the comments, I could use some good book recs.

Meanwhile, here is a little contest. I will send a PRIZE to whoever guesses where I was ALL STINKING DAY TODAY when I was supposed to be doing a spot on TV and then having a nice lunch with the book editor for the AJC... Seriously.
Hint: It is the LAST place I would ever expect to find me.

No hints from those of you who KNOW. Keep your yaps shut or the whole thing is VOID. She said crabbily. First correct guess only, and the prize pack will be nice! Audible, even, and foxy, and maybe I will throw in an ARC that I have lying around. BE IMAGINATIVE.
Hint: The answer is NOT "Kroger."

OFF TO WATCH PROJECT RUNWAY!
OH! PLEASE HEIDI! PLEASE! AUF VICTOR!

A Winner is ME

I belong to a Yahoo! group of mostly women, mostly mother writers --- I have been on this list for YEARS, actually. I love to hear the BING of an e-mail arrive when I am drafting because I can STOP for a moment go read it, so I belong to quite a few lists. (You can find the ones I think are good on my links ---not blinks, links---page.)

Anyway, this ONE I am on has AWARDS every year in various catagories, and everyone votes secretly and you can campaign for yourself and/or others and it's a huge HUGE list, bobbing up and down between one and two thousand members. We finished up the voting at the end of this month, and I was surprised to find I had won a couple. I took home �Most Likely to Become Famous� (and stop speaking to the rest of the list) Award and also "Most Outrageous" which is a sort of medicated second cousin to "The Funniest." I think it means "Funny, but Probably Mentally Ill." Thank you. I accept.

I was very very surprised to see that I had been nominated, much less won. WELL, that's not ENTIRELY true. I KNEW I would be nommed because I SHAMELESSLY nominated MY OWN SELF for Early Bird since I get up at 5 to write. Some chick that gets up at 4 beat me out. (Gratz Teena) But it was surprising that nominations not made BY ME FOR ME showed up --- I've been so quiet on that list lately. I was sure they had forgotten I exist. Lord knows I practically have forgotten. My slavering deadline, fanged and wearing tight pants, is stalking me. I am struggling to carve out enough writing time to get the book that is SO PERFECT here in my head out onto paper still recognizable as the lovely creature I IMAGINE it being. Story, moving from the head to the page, is the longest trip I know.

When they post the winners, they ALSO post ALL the nominees, which was cool because several of the people I nommed did not win, and yet they still got listed and recognized as cool, so. BUT! Perusing the nominations, I made the sad discovery that someone on that list SMOKES CRACK, positive BOATLOADS of crack, because I saw one person (and I can only assume it was ONE person) nommed me for "Most organized" After I stop laughing, I am going to have to schedule an intervention for that special lady. And here I pause to turn full face to the camera and say, "Whoever you are, if you are reading this blog entry, please step forward and let us help you. Crack kills, baby."

I am, in fact SO disorganized that I MISSED the annual CHAT where they announce the awards and stuff. I missed it because I forgot what day it was. I do not mean I forgot what day the CHAT was SCHEDULED --- I have been on that list for years, it's the same date every year. I mean, I forgot what the actual date was. I couldn't have told you if yesterday was Tuesday or Thursday (sources close to me have now informed me it was actually NEITHER), and I didn't realize we were even CLOSE to May's death and June's ascension.

I am SO disorganized that the SIGNED FIRST EDITION of Warren St. John's RAMMER JAMMER YELLOW HAMMER that I got for my dad for his upcoming birthday has been sitting in the middle of my office floor SINCE I got it at a lit conference that took place in the VERY beginning of May. It was sitting on the floor with about 15 other books in a veritable SNOWDRIFT of literature, and so for weeks now I have looked at that book on top of the snowdrift and thought, "If I don't get that thing off the floor, one day I will forget to put an appeasing sprinkle of food in the dieting-and-bitter-about-it cat's dish the minute I come down the stairs, and instead I will pour coffee and go to my office, and the cat will come roaring in after me, displeased, and ANNOUNCE I forgot the morning's kibble sprinkle in his usual manner, which is to say, he will take his mighty hooked claws and rend something on my office floor in twain, and since I don't have my favorite bone colored high heeled suede wedgie ankle strap sandals down here just now, he will choose a book, and even though there are at LEAST fifteen books there on the floor, only one of them is a signed first edition for my dad, and THAT will be the one. And then what will I do for my dad's birthday???"

I think I have had this chain of thought a solid TEN times over the last month...AND YET! I kept getting distracted by something SHINY in mid-bend-to-pick-up, and sure enough, this morning, I charged down the stairs with an epiphany I had just had about how to open Chapter 18, and I went directly to my office without passing Bowl or sprinkling 200 Kibbles, and as I was drafting, the cat came through like the wrath of the starving and long abandoned Aztec gods and SHREDDED the front cover of the one book in that book pile I REALLY wanted to preserve. GAHHHHHHHHHH!

AND MAY I SAY, Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer was sitting RIGHT BY the copy of How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got A Life I had ordered (USED) from Powell's on the same day I ordered Sloppy Firsts. (New copy, natch) Yeah, I wanted to read them side by side. PS Sloppy Firsts is a VERY sharp, smart, book--- strong voice and layered characters. Nails adolescence. Sticks the landing. ANYWAY, why couldn't the cat destroy the Opal Mehta book which was bought used and which, quite frankly, I am not ever going to give as a present?

Other things on the TOP of that 15 book drift in the middle of my office that went COMPLETELY unmolested:
Some falling apart galleys in bound MS page form
A National Geographic that Scott already devoured
A copy of gods in Alabama, which, as you can imagine, is not my ONLY copy of that particular work....

But no. Had to be the Rammer Jammer, did it?
Cat: *smug voice* Yes.

I HOPE I am organized enough to remember to go RESHOP for my dad before his birthday. Which is IFFY. Because last year, his birthday was in August, and that means it will probably be in August again THIS year, and what are the chances I can get organized enough to go shop and find and wrap before THAT deadline? Because I think it may be June today.

GAH I have now spent the tiny slice of life I had carved out to BLOG this morning babbling ON AND ON AND ON....GAH, I need to go jump back on Chapter 18, jump on it hard, jump RIGHT on it as if it were Johnny Depp in Full. Pirate. Regalia. ... Wait, what was I talkign about?

LOVE,
The Outrageous and soon to be Famous Ms Joshilyn "Oh no, now she got the Big Head" Jackson

Three Little Words

Alert reader PATTIE sent me this, and it made my day:

"Today I worked at the Scholastic Book Fair at my daughter's school. They had two copies of gods in Alabama. They were on a table of books for adults, next to a cookbook entitled Cheap. Fast. Good!"

HEHEHEHEH First of all, I need that cookbook, just because I need to make dinners that are cheap and fast and good...

Second of all, if you have read gods in Alabama, you will know that in MANY ways the cookbook title is a string of adjectives that MODIFY Arlene, the book's narrator.

They do NOT, thank you, modify its author. Ahem.

A Nose Poodle Deferred

I have a sacred paper calendar. If it doesn't make it from my computer, phone messages, or brain to the sacred paper calendar, I flake. Period. The paper calendar is the final authority that determines where I will be when to do what. It is the ultimate of ultimates. I say all this to say:

This morning, strictly of its own volition, my paper calendar leapt to its death. It hurled off its oppressive THUMBTACK and plummeted off my bulletin board to disappear behind a HUGE IMMOVABLE printer table. Ding Dong, the schedule is dead, and it took my date by date to do list with it. The part of me that is experiencing all the gorgeous lovely renewal of faith that spring and Easter brings began babbling that THIS was clearly a message from God, something about, "FORGET YOUR DEADLINES AND GO OUT AND ENJOY THE BEAUTY OF THE EARTH TODAY!"

I called Karen and entreated her via her answering machine to join me in hurling off the keyboardian shackles and taking a lovely drive north on scenic highway 400.

Don't worry, I haven't grown a soul. You can keep yer mountain vistas---I personally feel that a great deal of earthly beauty can be found at the outlet malls of north Georgia. I am not really an AH! SUNSET! kind of girl, but I dearly love a sling back. ALSO, I SO need a purse. My poor abused everyday darling fell into CHUNKS yesterday, in retrospect a CLEAR sign that I need to go shopping!

I was feeling very PLEASED with the Lord after the great CALENDAR sign, so I was very suggestible and willing to seek further signs while ON the shopping trip. Signs that weren't even about purses, or even SHOES. Hopefully there would be a sign or three about buying pants. (I take it as a given that if a pair of pants make a person's butt look good, that is a MESSAGE.) Then I thought, if the calendar's demise WAS a sign, surely the Almighty is sending equally loud and portentous messages to my editor right now, telling HER my deadlines for these interviews, bios, updates and articles etc. I am 'sposed to be writing to help get the word out about my most beloved Between, Georgia should be PUSHED BACK, and so I sat, breathless, cloaked in faith, EXPECTING the telephone to ring.

Silence.

After a time, I heard a much quieter voice, one that might even be described as both still and small, mentioning that a trip to North Georgia to acquire COACH purses at the thrilling discounts, delightful as it might be, cannot really be counted as a spiritual journey . And then the phone rang and it was Karen, saying, NO, she can't go to the outlets with me, am I on CRACK, she has a DEADLINE, remember DEADLINES?

Oh. Right. Now I do.

Now I have to go crawl UNDER that behemoth of a table and fish out my calendar. I will no doubt get dust up my nose and maybe even swallow a bug. Bleh!

I SORROWFULLY TELL YOU: I still like dogs. I will tell you about the nose poodle NEXT time. I have too many deadlines this weekend, and clearly I am being cosmically FORCED to try to meet them.

I EVEN MORE SORROWFULLY TELL YOU: I cannot get my haiku judge on the phone. She is hiding. RESULTS as soon as I track her down. If only I had thought to dart her and tag her ear like they used to do on Wild Kingdom! Then I could turn on my little tracking device and IF, by CHANCE she was at the ANN TAYLOR LOFT OUTLET up on highway 400, THAT would be SO OBVIOUSLY a sign!!!! I bet she is there right this VERY second! Gahhh.

Exotic Robot Sex Tea

This entry has very little to do with exotic robot sex tea. I know you are disappointed. SORRY. I am too, to be honest. On the bright side, I bet I get a lot of slavering electronic Chai-pervs surfing in from Google. Tra La. I need to put up signs for them. I need one that says:
WELCOME, CHAI PERVS!

and then another that says:
NO ROBOT SEX TEA HERE, EXOTIC OR OTHERWISE.
Better luck to you over at http://exoticrobotsextea.com

I hope none of you ACTUALLY clicked that. And in case you did, let me say, it should be a dead link. Because I made it up. At least, I hope I made it up. If it actually GOES somewhere, I refuse to be held accountable for the content. I wouldn't even know what the content might be. It's not a link *I* would ever click. *Superior Sniff* NO, NO, CERTAINLY NOT!

This entry is all about things I cannot tell you yet. TO WIT!

1) Mir is going to announce something later. Maybe Monday. I was halfway through a long, terribly amusing---practically droll ----little epic prose poem, just a little Pulitzer-worthy something I whipped up that was both trumpeting Mir's delightful project AND riffing on Beowulf all while employing iambic pet-tantra-merecat and a big fat scoop of EXTRA onomatopoeia, when I got an IM from her that said, BY THE WAY, DO NOT ANNOUNCE MY SECRET THING BECUASE IT IS SECRET. So. I just deleted it. , I mean, Life's work, Schmife's work. I am sure I will come up with another ground breaking literary form tomorrow.

Or not.

2) Yes, Virginia, there IS an exotic robot sex tea story. But I JUST CHECKED and I am not allowed to tell THAT story yet EITHER. I am being very thwarted, and passing my thwartation down to you in the form of SNIDE GRUMPING. No, this is not like the pink socks. Remember the pink socks? Because I don't. If you came in late, it was this whole thing on the blog where I started to tell a story about pink socks and then could not tell it because of some distraction or pre-emptedness, and then I forgot to tell it for so long and put it off and put it off so that eventually I forgot the actual story.

People kept bringing it up in the comments but I TRULY had forgotten what happened except what I could extrapolate from the title which was, "somethign appened this one time and someone, maybe me, had or was wearing or mentioned pink socks." It was not a terribly interesting extrapolation. SO CLEARLY This is different because even if I do forget the whole story, WHICH I WILL NOT AS I TOOK PRE EMPTIVE NOTES, but even if I forgot and the notes got MAGICALLY LOST the story I extrapolate from "Exotic Robot Sex Tea" must, yes, MUST, be at least more interesting than any story extrapolated about PINK SOCKS. RIGHT? So. More on this topic later. Pinky Swear. Pinky SOCKY swear, even.

3) At this point, you get to get GRUMPY BACK and say, FINE, JACKSON. WHAT THE HECK CAN YOU TELL US THEN...

Ah, so glad you asked! I can tell you the names and URLS of the...

Trading Space

Before we lived in this house and my office became "my office," it was essentially a dull but serviceable room. The rest of the house had the previous owner's very definate imprint all over it (Luckily she tended toward neutrals and the kind of taste I like to call "good") but there was an aesthetic, you know? The house looked lived in and loved. Not so much the office. My office was the roomly personification of Sara Plain and Tall. Painted white. No window treatments beyond miniblinds. Here it is with Beautiful Maisy Circa Barely Two standing in it. See how neat? How tidy? How regulation standard and workaday?

When we bought it, that changed. I moved into it. I brought with me Chaos, and Chaos instituted Piles, and Piles Grew into Slag Heaps, and Slag Heaps grew until they intermingled and entangled themselves with each other and became one huge Slough of Despond, and beneath the tattered surface of this nightmare, whole trash-book-importantpaper-mail-toy-shoe societies boiled within themselves and interbred and produced genetically mutated cousin-on-cousin-for-nineteen-generations type spawn and then cruel, inbred ecosystems emerged and and eventually (and if this doesn't signify the beginning of the end, I don't know what does...) a policitcal system was instituted and the old diet Cherry Coke cans (who, like most trash, naturally gravitate toward the filthy world of politics) taxed the living CRAP out of the innocent reams of blank paper.

I SO meant to take a picture of this Swamp of Sorrows phase, but I was prevented from staining your eyes with such graphic images by the same benevolent God who created Basic Human Decency, although admittedly He gave me a pauper's share of that commodity (left to myself, Beloveds, *I* would have shown you) but He substituted a faulty Digi-cam memory disc for my lack of discretion and taste. You should probably release some white doves and say thank you. I did find an old picture of my desk...Imagine a WHOLE ROOM like this, with a little path running from the door to the computer chair, where on a GOOD day you might see the glimmer of one desperately unhappy and oppressed carpet fiber:

BUT ALL THAT IS ABOUT TO CHANGE.

Remember when we got all above our raisin' and bought ourselfs some for really true fancypants ART?

Well, I decided to redecorate the office to look like a place where this Picture would want to live. Look at the empty vastness of the landscape...I can't have my SPACE BLIMP CAT CAPTAIN peering out of the frame at the UN EMPTY UN VAST lanscape of my abbatoir of an office and then offing itself in despair.

SO, to this end, I released my inner Edmund Walker and got fabric samples and paint chips and made decisions, and this weekend, we took shovels and put on haznmat suits and cleaned the place OUT, down to the BONES. I am currently sitting in the center of a room with a table in it. The only thing on top of the table is my computer. After we got it stripped, we painted it a lovely color of FLAT PAINT (not semi-gloss! We used actual BIG GIRL FLAT PAINT on the theory that my little children won't be in here all the time runnign their grubulent paws all over the walls oh OH IT IS SO PRETTY FLAT PAINT IS! I had FORGOTTEN!) called Crocodile Tears, and today the table gets moved out and the carpet man comes. My mother is having a seamstress (LOVE! THIS! WORD!) Make me beautiful wondow treatments out of the fabrics I chose (MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ME) and buying me a sassy mod-poddy LAMP, and today someone comes to remove the oppressed carpet and put in fresh, virginal, hopeful carpet that smells young and dewy and of such quality that it probably believes it is being installed someplace NICE.

MY JUSTIFICATION FOR DOING IT: If my office looks beautiful, the space will foster creativity, be pleasing to the eye, and improve the quality of life of the many hours a week I spend in it. HA!

MY MOTHER THE IDEALIST'S THEORY: If the office looks beautiful, I might be inspired to not let the first room you see to your right as you enter my house look like crack-addled bears have been living in there in pungent squalor for years and years and years.

SCOTT THE PRAGMATIST'S THEORY: For one brief shining moment there will be Camelot. And I will take pictures of said office and show you, Oh My Best Beloveds, even borrowing a digi-cam if our disc issues do not resolve, and then, slowly, my basic nature will reassert itself and as people come in I will pull the doors gently closed and say, YEAH. I KNOW. BUT THERE'S A GORGEOUS OFFICE UNDER THAT....OR THERE USED TO BE. HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO SEE THE FLOOR OR INDEED, MOST OF THE WALLS OR FURNITURE FOR YEARS NOW.

The Beautiful Office will be like Schrodinger's Blasted Cat, who, if he is INDEED dead is HAUNTING me as I research this novel. That is to say, the office will be alive in theory, but also simultaneously theoretically dead, because who can prove it has not encountered radiation and perished beneath the impenetrable shield of my natural squalor. I bet, in six months time, if you dig under the pitted lunar landscape of my detritus, you will find opposing teams of Theoretical Physicists and Anthropologists living side by side in uneasy, bitter rivalry, squabbling over whose study takes precedence, one-upping each other, jockeying for position, and jealously comparing the size of their....grants.

AH WELL! I say all this to say, Scott is waiting to rip this table and my computer out for the carpet guys. I will have no internets ALL DAY...I'm slightly horrified.

If It Sounds Dirty, Blame Your Filthy Ears

WARNING, this entry is rated Rated PG Sperm-teen, which means that if you aren't old enough to read the word sperm about 500 times without giggling, stop reading. Of course, this probably means I am not mature enough read it, so forgive the typos. My own edict forbids me from proofreading.

I have MT BLACKLIST to get all the CIALIS links out of my comments, but I JUST deleted a comment that was directing people to buy the SEMENAX SPERM PILL. Which...I almost left that comment up. WHAT THE HECK IS A SPERM PILL? I hope to GOD it is not a pill MADE out of sperm that claims to give you glossy hair. Because, ew. I TRULY HOPE it is a pill you have to GIVE individual sperms. I wonder what you would do to make them take it? You could maybe hide it in cheese or peanut butter? What do Sperms like? Or maybe Sperms are like cats and you just have to STUFF it in and hold their mouths closed til they swallow, their little tails wriggling and thrashing in spermly rage. The fact that every man walking around has, like, a BILLION of them means there is potentially a HUGE market for this product. Ah well, I shall never know. I DID delete it on principle. Can't encourage the comment spammers...

In comments, the non-Spam Aimee Parrott said she almost "Sproinked Herself." I have no response to this, but felt it was worth repeating in an entry titled, "If It Sounds Dirty, Blame Your Filthy Ears."

My brother, who gave up cursing for Lent one year and never went back to it, has invented his own cursewords that sound dirty but are not, and the foulest of them all is, "Pony Hole." Ew.

I maintain that "Succulent Vines" sounds REPULSIVE.

Not Dirty Sounding: When I returned from Christmas, I had three packages piled on my dining room table. They were VERY GREAT.

Package One: The ARCs (advanced reader copies) for BETWEEN, GEORGIA. It is SO freakin' sexy to hold and sniff the ARCs of a book I wrote that there should be a filthy sounding word for it.

Package two: MY SECRET FRIEND EXISTS. I got an email from her and also GODIVA DARK CHOCOLATE COCOA and SANTA while I was gone! But she has remained determinedly secret, and yet Christmas is OVER... Perhaps because I was such a pony hole this year and revealed too early, MY SF has decided to remain unrevealed.

Package Three: Lip gloss and a shirt and necklace from my best friend. HUZZAH!

Clearly Santa exists. And even more clearly, I was a VERY good girl, right up until the point that I posted this not-actually-filthy blog entry. BUT IT IS SIMPLY TOO LATE. I have my loots already, and I don't have to worry about being good enough to garner loots in 2006 until January.

Let the naughtiness commence!

And to begind it I present unto you, a Bonus Transcript of a Filthy Conversation With Mir

Mir: Monkey has a thing on his thumb, and I thought it was a wart but he says it hurts.
Me: Warts can't hurt?
Mir: So that makes it... what? A boil? The plague?
Me: Um some sort of wartlike hurty thing? That is my diagnosis speaking as a doctor.
Mir: I have some of those wart-away strips, but I don't want to use one if it's a booboo.
Me: Maybe it was a wart and he scraped it and hurt it and that is why it hurts?
Mir: But he has no recollection of having hurt his thumb.
Me: Well, that means nothing -- my child will come home spurting arterial blood with no leg and not know how he got hurt.
Mir: Haha true --- how do I determine if it's a wart?
Me: If in 2 days the soreness has abated and it looks like a wart, then it is a wart. If in 2 days the soreness has not abated, then it is NOT a wart, and he must go to the vet and be treated for plague
Mir: You so smart.

*pause*

Mir: GAH I went looking for pictures of warts and clicked on a link and it was GENITAL WARTS
Mir: MY EYES!!!!

3 Things I Want to Tell You (unrelated)

1.) There's a very interesting (and funny and well written) take on the new Pride and Prejudice movie on .Salon.com You should go give it a read. The reviewer is peeved that Jane's been made so sentimental, so gooey, so lovestruck and double plus romantical. Jane was a pragmatist, and she had a biting black wit that the movie loses almost utterly in favor in rain swept moors and snogging. The reviewer's points are well taken, however... I just loved that movie. Shamelessly.

I started reading Jane Austen when I was twelve. I still read her, and get through every one of her books about once every two years, I would say. I even read Lady Susan and the fragments.

And this movie...it was the movie of the book I read when I was twelve years old, NOT the movie of the book I read NOW. At twelve, her books were love stories to me, pure and simple. I adored them. At some point in high school, I realized the books were FUNNY. I was in college by the time I realized how keen-eyed and insightful she was. I have loved these books at every age and every stage, and think all my points of view on them as I grew up were true and valid, even if not EQUALLY true and valid. YES, Jane's pragmatic, but she believes in marrying for love. She believes in warmth and the beauty of human attachment---and that was ALL I saw her in books as a pratling.This is the movie of THAT book, the book of my pale pink pubescent heart, and accepting it as such, I quite enjoyed it.

Knightly was a lively and delightful Elizabeth and for some reason made me think of the nickname that Garp gives the babysitter in my third favorite John Irving novel: Little Squab Bones. Also, I LOVED Sutherland's mumbling, wry, understated take on Mr. B. I say, oh heck, give it a tumble.

By the way, just so you know I am enough of a lunatic fringe Jane-lover to have an opinion, allow me to insert that I will never forgive Patricia Rozema for the abasement of MANSFIELD PARK.

2) Yesterday I was talking with a friend about geography, and I realized once again how much my memory is tied to SMELLS. I can't remember places very well, or things I see, but I remember smells perfectly, and smells bring back memories for me more than any other sense. Every year, when it gets cold and the air gets that sharp, winter smell, I inexplicably become happy. Except not really inexplicably. In fact, I can explit it: The air smelled like this the first time Scott kissed me, and we agreed to probably get married and have a bunch of babies that same night.

Of course, there are bad parts to smell being such a gateway to memory for me... San Francisco, a gorgeous city I adore, is for me forever tied to the stench of those sea lions. Cute, but LORDY, they smell like the sulpherous farts of the damned in hell.

3) Yesterday my mother called me and said, "Can you run to Target and see if they have the KEEPSAKE TINS of YU-GI-OH cards? We are sold out here and if I have to go to one more store looking for them, I am going to end up strangling a clerk. That will NOT be Christmassy."

Reader, I WENT. I went to TARGET on the Wedneday before Christmas. Let me say, I called my mother after and told her we were even. No more hanging that "I carried you in my body for ten months because you were late and then suffered 30 hours of hard labor because this was before they invented the really GOOD drugs" over my head. I am PAID UP.

It turned out to be good for me, as well, because I realized that, while I had done all my TRUE Christmas Shopping in October and November, I had waited to buy stocking stuffers out of a misguided feeling that the candy might go STALE or something. I forgot that this is America, and candy here is actually 5% candy and 95% a mix of preservative chemicals, hormones, SOMA, and mind control fluid the government puts in to make us ALL think we have "RESTLESS LEG SYNDROME" so that big pharmeceutical companies can sucker us into trying to cure it by gobbling up great fistfuls of their RESTLESS LEG SYNDROME STOPPING PILLS, and thereby fund the mass emailings of SPAM advising my penis-less self to hoover up delicious Cialis SOFT TABS as if no one is going to think, "Do I really want to take something called a SOFT TAB for Erectile Dysfunction???" BUT. I. DIGRESS.

The point is, I had Maisy with me, so I thought I would not get to BUY my stuffers....but she fell asleep in the car. I slung her up in one arm, pushed a cart with the other, and marched all over Target for 30 minutes through the congested, teeming aisles. I was like a Salmon swimming upstream, if Salmons had to tote 30 pounds worth of sleeping pre-schooler. AND I GOT ONE OF THE LAST THREE YU-GI-OH TINS TO BOOT. I TOTALLY won shopping.

Bonus thing: Mir decided to be my UNsecret friend (because my secret friend had some sort of internet problem and I never heard from her again after that first time). Mir sent me a CHARMING book and a pair of teeny handcuffs with one side labelled YOU and one side labelled YOUR KEYS. Very, very needed. I am pleased to have an UNsecret friend, since I did such a BANG UP job this year of being unsecret myself, as you may recall. I sent MY secret friend a letter that went something like this: "HI IT IS ME YOUR SECRET FRIEND! Love, Joshilyn." That was...slightly less secret than I wanted to be. Signing your NAME is not like a CLUE so much as it is like THE ANSWER. Next year I will be all CLEVER and sign off with a RIDDLE instead of my name. Something like, "Love, SECRET FRIEND whose name rhymes with SHMOSHILYN except with a J in front and the H si silent!"

Yeah. That ought to do it.

TSTL

TOO STUPID TO LIVE: A common complaint about poorly written romance novels in which the heroine cannot seem to brush her teeth without beginning to choke to death on a crystallized lump of old Crest which air-hardened into a threat because she did not screw the cap properly, even though in the last chapter the hero TOLD her this could happen, and she, in a misguided attempt at feistiness, rebelliously decided to NOT screw the cap and therefore he has to rush in and administer the Heimlich maneuver at which point she is saved and decides she will, in the next chapter, screw, if not the cap, at least maybe the hero. These are the heroines who are biologically incapable of LOOKING before they cross a street, so that they are constantly imperiled by trucks. They can't go on a nature walk without choosing the path with the signs that say WARNING: DEADLY PUMA, and if they can douse themselves a spray bottle full of gravid puma urine that they have mistaken for a perfume atomizer before they go, so much the better. They blunder off cliffs, fall off ships, willfully shriek 'til the avalanche starts, hurl themselves in front of bullets and arrows and stampedes, are equal parts beautiful and flammable, and if you say to one of them, "Just don't touch that big red knob, see it? The one with the sign on it that says NO NO! DO NOT TOUCH! ENDS ALL LIFE AS WE KNOW IT. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, ANY KNOB BUT THIS!" , their immediate and response is to say, "What, this knob here?" while reaching out to give it a good, experimental yoinking. And I, ladies and gentlemen? I am horrified to report that I am one of 'em. Too. Stupid. To. Live.

Every year, one of the things that makes Christmas feel like Christmas to me is being involved in a Secret Friend program. Yes. I know. It's dorky. But when I have claimed to be an Undork? Hint: Never. So.
And it makes me happy, which means, Sheryl Crow assures me, that it can't be that bad. And I am Too Stupid Too Live, so I think I get to take that literally.

So I signed up again this year and was having a high old time, signing my letters to her Sherlock and sending her Snow Globe kits and scented soaps and whatnot, it's all good fun 'til someone loses an eye, right? Anyway. I wrote her this very long letter about children's books, and in the middle of writing it, apparently something SHINY ran by and I forgot who I was writing to or what the purpose of the whole thing was or just suffered a random brain fart... no clue.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I SIGNED it. I SIGNED the letter. With my STUPID NAME.

I feel all let down and sad. Blew it. No one to blame but myself. And YES OKAY I KNOW, it's a stupid thing to be unhappy over, but it was important to me. I'm all weepish and ruint over it. Like I've grinched myself. I can't even WRITE to her now, I am SO embarrassed. I think instead I'll go run with this stick in my mouth. Because, really, what's the worst thing that could happen?

INTERNATIONAL PAJAMA DAY!

I hereby declare today to be INTERNATIONAL PAJAMA DAY. Today I shall clean up a little, make some phonecalls, do a little revising, finish at least one of the three books I am in the middle of reading, play with Maisy, dabble in Warcraft, talk on the phone, and lavish affection upon the hapless cat. In other words, nothing that requires me to get out of these pajamas. The pajama bottoms are pink with HUGE obnoxious grandma' s couch style cabbage roses all over, and I am wearing them with an old pink maternity T shirt circa 1997, and Sam was a BIG baby. He weighed in at almost 12 pounds. SO, this shirt is so floppy that I could fit the cat in here with me and probably a Llama and a small herd of those miniatuer antelope. I am not going to brush my hair, even. You can't make me.

BY THE WAY, I just learned from a woman who writes horror fiction that those BRATZ dolls (which already creep me out) have CHANGEABLE FEET. Yikes. You can yoink their feet right off and stick on entirely NEW feet. It is because they have such complicated, hookery shoes, so you can't actually CHANGE the shoes themselves. I won't have those things in my house. They are so NOSELESS and HORRIFYING. I think they have no noses because they did not get their syphilis treated, and the dern things rotted right off. Now they have brain lesions and dementia, and THAT explains the hacking off their own feet any time they want to change shoes.

My new policy is to only buy toys that do not exhibit the symptoms of untreated venereal diseases. I am all about Polly Pocket and My Little Pony.

Yesterday I went Christmas shopping ALL DAY with my friend Karen. HIGHLIGHTS:

1) At Macy's, there is a PIG. It is either A) a live pig, or B) a ride, or C) a ride with a live pig on it. It cost three dollars to see for sure. I felt it was only worth the three dollars if it was C) a ride WITH a live pig on it, so we did not go.

2) At the big mall in Atlanta, they have a real beard Santa with LONG blow dried feathery white hair. He looks very cheerful and ... coifed. He is clearly a rich people's Santa who has been to Vidal Sassoon.

3) They had some sort of advertisement thing on the floor. I wish I could explain this. It was like a big FLAT SCREEN, maybe 8 feet by 5 feet? And the screen would have images or ads on it, and you could move things with your feet by walking or dancing on the screen. It was SO ODD. Like, there was a BANK AD. The bank's logo was submerged in a fish pond full of goldfish. And as we STAMPED on the goldfish, they would RUUUUUN, and the surface would ripple as if we had kicked the top of a real fishpond. Each ad would stay on for maybe a minute, and about every third add, a GAME would come up, like a soccer field, or an air hockey table, with a ball you could move by stamping and kicking at it. We set down all our packages and and stamped all over that thing for at least ten minutes, completely oblivious to the fact that from any more than 3 feet away, where a person could not see the screen in the floor, we must have looked like complete LOONS who had shed several hundred dollars worth of merchandise and thrown theuir coats on the floor to giggle and shriek and dance around with no music and NO VISIBLE CAUSE.

4) At the French Soap Store --- and here let me pause and say, Yes, Virginia, there really is a French Soap Store. An ENTIRE huge store devoted to NOTHING but French soap. Quite shocking to a rube like me. Why, I had to burp in surprise and scratch myself! Okay, that is not true. But I SAY IT because French Soapstress came over to tell us about the wonders of French Soap, and after a few minutes of her burbling Joie de Vivre-ally about "The Lanolin covered fields of Sheepful Provence" and me boggling at the 65 dollar pricetag on a teeny box of French Soap shaped like a bee, the Soaptress asked if we lived in town or were visiting. I said I was in town visiting Karen, and Karen said, "Yeah she lives way out in South Cobb County." And the Soapstress LEAPT BACK in horror, as if Karen had held me up with tweezers and said "LOOK! I BROUGHT YOU SOME POO!"

I was clearly not qualified to buy French Soap, so we went next door to Ann Taylor where I forgot I was Christmas Shopping and accidentally spent 97 dollars on a cashmere sweater. <---not true, Scott, if you are reading this. And pay no attention ot the Ann Taylor bill when it comes later this month. They were smoking a BIG HOOKAH full of opium when we were in there, and they may have accidentally charged me for a cashmere sweater I would not ever buy myself right at Christmas. Drug addicts, every one of 'em. AND ANYWAY I did not buy the 6 month old African Gray Parrot we saw at PetSmart, who was 1300 dollars and who CLEARLY LOVED ME and WANTED me to buy both him and about 700 dollars of Parrot-Keeping equipment and toys and feed and perches. So. We didn't lose 100 dollars, we gained 2,000 and a REALLY nice sweater. And maybe a camisole.

Meme-y Meme-y

GOING ON TEN DAYS. NO SCOTT. NOT GOOD. Soon I will begin drifting about the house in filthy pajamas and eating ice cream for breakfast and writing bad haiku about absence.

(Pull on my same jeans
Why launder, why smell good, why
even sniff-check them?)

It is all downhill from there.

In brighter news, author Nichelle Tramble Tagged me with a MEME! I NEVER get tagged with a meme. I feel all MUTUAL OF OMAHA'S WILD KINGDOM. My ear is a little sore, but I am game! <---GET IT!!! I am GAME??? Get it? HA! Where is a rimshot audiofile when you need one?

10 Reading Secrets, because I do not have 15. My life is AN OPEN BOOK. (Where is that RIMSHOT? OMG the PUNS -- see what happens when you take SCOTT away for too long. PUNS! And BAD HAIKU!)

1) I had a BIG crush on Henry in THE SECRET HISTORY. Yeah, he is kinda big and ugly and a complete geek and he, you know, KILLS people, but something about the smarty-pants classical Greek training, the Apollonian mind yearning for Dionysian release...Oh. Yeah. Kiss me, ya big murdering dork.

2) Which is the micro-cosm of the macro-secret which is, I DO get crushes on characters in books I read, which is SO dorky that if only I would start killing people I would probably be an e-harmony dot com perfect match-up for Henry.

3) When I was growing up, I wanted to be Trixie Belden. I thought Nancy Drew was a snot.

4) When I was about 10, I STOLE my parents copy of Alex Haley's ROOTS which I was expressly forbidden to read until I was older because they thought the themes in that book were much too adult for me to process, and um, YEAH. They SURE were. I read it at night, buried under my blankets, fascinated and horrified, weeping until the snot ran out of my nose that people could be so mean to other people. I had until then not known.

5) I also stole and read JAWS. Which I just thought was cool, AND from which I learned SEVERAL cursewords I had not yet heard spoken aloud.

6) My brother made me read all the Conan books AND H.P Lovecraft AND all the Gray Mouser books. I am convinced that this is why I am a geek.

7) The only reason I do not write space opera, I am convinced, is that I ALSO read Peter Pan, Charlotte's Web, both Bronte sisters, A.A. Milne, all of Jane Austen, Little Women, all of Roald Dahl, all of Tove Janssen, and A Little Princess to ABSOLUTE tatters. And secretly, I STILL enjoy the STINK out of all those books. Yes, even A Little Princess. WHEN SHE GIVES AWAY FIVE OF THE SIX HOT BUNS! OH! OH!

8) You know that I am not allowed to read on stairs, but I ALSO used to walk down the streets of Chicago reading, and I had to stop that because I kept getting almost mowed down by busses when I forgot where I was and gamboled cheerfully out into traffic.

9) I am such a fangrrrrl of certain authors that I physically FEAR meeting them because I am sure I will open my mouth to say HELLOILOVEYOUYOUARETHEBESTGREATESTONEEVER and instead I will vomit down my front. I had a CHANCE to meet one of my favorite authors of all time, and I PHYSICALLY could not make myself go. I was SO sure I would puke.

10) I once read 10 or 12 of the MOST LURID romance bodice rippers I could FIND in a SINGLE weekend because I had decided to write a LURID BODICE RIPPER with my friend Lydia, and I firmly believed and believe you can NOT write anything decent in a genre you have not read extensively. SO after my crash course, Lyd and I went out to a Martini Bar and PLOTTED the whole thing out with kidnappings and dashing rescues and many, many, torn petticoats and bosoms of the heaving variety, and THEN we named all the characters. Unfortunately, we also taste tested Green Apple-tinis and Crantinis and Godiva-tinis and I remember NOTHING of the entire outline, except the villian was going to be named HORACE MONTMORECY, THE EARL OF EMMESWORTH. And the lead character was named Veronica or January, we got in a fight about that. And then ordered Citrus-Blast-Tinis and forgave each other and decided to call her soemthign completely different. I think at one point, one of us may have even said, " I LOVE YOU, MAN." Sad. Sad. Sad.

I think I am supposed to TAG people here? See, no one ever MEMES me so I do not know how to behave? Okay well, LET US DO THIS, let's tag via COMMENTS -- first three commenters can TAG a blogger, and I will then come back and list them here, and shoot them YOU HAVE BEEN TAGGED e-mails. GO!

Avian-tor

No one is going to let me have a baby, so now I want a parrot. A GREY Parrot who looks like THIS:

The best parrots are babies that you get and hand wean yourself and raise up, but I think you have to really know your parrot-y stuff or you do it wrong and maladjust them. WHO KNOWS ABOUT PARROTS? I think if I tried to hand wean I would make the parrot wrong-headed and crazy. Can you get a hand fed nicely pre-weaned parrot and make friends with him? Or will he never love you anymore if you do not personally raise him? How can you be sure the people selling you the parrot are good parrot loving darlings that have kissed all over the parrot from egg on up and made him not depressed but rather nice and well adjusted and people friendly? Are there the parrot version of a PUPPY MILL where you get crapulent ruined sad mentally ill parrots? HOW DO YOU KNOW if the parrot is a good parrot?

My lord, google is trying to distract me with Glamorous Macaw Parrots. And the HYACINTH ones ARE breathtaking, LOOK AT HIM! LOOK AT HIS FRIEND!

But Congo Greys seem more personality-ish and shirty and funny. "It's about beauty on the inside," she said maturely, and then ruined it by adding, "And Greys have NICE butts in a color I woukld absolutely wear if it was a lipstick." So.

RIGHT NOW my babies are too little and parrots are bitey. It will be a few years, plus the cat needs to be older; A 6.5 year old cat is still in his parrot slaughtering prime. A nine or ten year old cat, however, especially one as fat as mine, is a different animal. Assuming my poor overfed one-eyed butt-plucker lives nine or ten years, which he BETTER.

NEVER THE LESS. I AM GETTING A PARROT IN THREE YEARS.

Scott seems amenable to the whole parrot thing because EITHER he suspects that in three years I will be haring off about soemthign completely different and will have FORGOTTEN that I need a parrot to be happy, OR it is just that I am shutting up about how I want a BABY, and he knows you do not have to pay to send a parrot to COLLEGE. PLUS SIDE: A Parrot seems nearly as troublesome and loud and messy as a toddler, and NEVER GROWS UP! This is what I need -- a PERMA toddler bothering me all the time. ALSO they are LOUD! I am a NOISE person. I like a loud house, btu don;t care much for music. I keep the TV on in another room all the time just to have SOUND going, and I TALK to the TV and I talk to the cat, and these things, they don't ANSWER. Parrots WILL.

I NEED A PARROT. A NAUGHTY loud parrot named Forsythe. Or Jeeves. Not sure, but definately soemthing BUTLER-Y.

Countdown to Parrot, T minus 3 years.

If you are wondering where this came from, I went over to my new friend Karen's house for the first time last night. SHE HAS PARROTS. You should see how much these parrots LIKE her. You should see how ALIVE these parrots are behind their eyes. They THINK things, you can see them thinking, and they are curious and dear---I didn't realize a bird could be so....himself. So person-y and exact. And their feathers are practically individually prehensile and they puff and fluff themselves into shapes based on what they are feeling. When she buries her nose in Dexter's back and shrieks, WHO IS A CHICKEN? WHO IS A BIG CHICKEN? he cranes his head up and press-press-presses his face adoringly into her neck. I admit, I found it rather touching.

HEY. Did I mention I am getting a PARROT? I will wait though, until the cat is old and slow and my children are old enough to know not to torment the parrot until he takes a chunk out of them. Three or four years -- OH! I just decided! I am getting a parrot when I turn 40. AS A PRESENT TO MYSELF for not dying of turning 40. I must begin saving up to buy a parrot and parrot accoutrements NOW because my LORD a good bird is a zillion quadrillion dollars plus he will need a big HOME cage in my bedroom and a play area in my office so he can hang out with me while I work and maybe another play area in the living room and toys and all manner fo nuts and mushfeeds and bells and chew sticks.

I am all about parrots now. All parrots, all the time.

PARROT!

This Year, Give the Gift of a Tequila Bottle Upside the Head!

I thought I would take a moment and answer some questions I have recently received from friends and colleagues via the miracle of e-mail. Questions you might have been wondering about yourself...

From the inimitable Shawn Box: How is the International Celebrity thing going?

Answer: Oh well, you know. Sven is peeling me a grape as I try to suffer through the ennui the pappazazzi make me feel...Honestly, there are times when I have to clear my schedule and pencil in a whole day for "Empathizing with Paris Hilton."

From Karen, also writing to deadline, about my endless five pounds war: Eh, worry about it after the holidays, I say. I tend to eat less when I'm REALLY stressed, so, by that rationale, at some point during this book-writing process I should be thoroughly emaciated. Does it work like that for you?

Answer: No. I frickin' eat MORE when stressed. So. By that rationale, at some point during this book-writing process I will smash myself into the earth and wipe out all the dinosaurs.

And this final question, from three different people in the last three days. Yes. Really. The universe wants me to answer this question: How are you so productive with two kids?

Answer: Oh well, I just, you know, lock them in the old refrigerator I keep down in the basement. Then they have to be still and quiet to preserve oxygen.

If you are dangerously mentally ill and reading this, allow me to say: THAT WAS A JOKE. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. I ACTUALLY lock them into a wooden box with many air holes and a Jumbo Hamster-Water delivery system.

*rimshot*

SPEAKING OF E-MAIL...I got a note from Sheila Curran, author of the rawwwwwther fantastic Diana Lively is Falling Down a comedy of manners I found to be JUST so charming and entertaining and the writing blew me away. It was one of those books that made me want to kidnap the author and tie them to a chair and make them read MY book, but really, The Author's Guild frowns on that sort of thing. But then in this weird coincidence, she JOINED THE GCC (my little group of fellow scribes that cross blogs and cross pollinates) and I managed to mention to her in casual passing (without throwing up on myself or slavering) that I had truly enjoyed her book. And SHE, that darling, read mine and wrote me the most lovely and gracious letter back, which is ---

BEEP!BEEP!BEEP! We interrupt this blog for a cheery little dollop of prostitution:

On December 4th, I am heading to one of my very most favorite INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORES, the Alabama Booksmith, to sign pre-ordered copies of GODS IN ALABAMA and inscribe them for Christmas/Chanukah/Kwanzaa gifts. And BY THE WAY, The Atlanta Journal and Constitution just listed gods in Alabama as one of the best books of the year in their big best books round-up (which I STILL have not seen because I accidentally recycled the paper before reading it, HEH) So Yay, and if you are giving a book as a present, shouldn't it be one that a major newspaper has just ASSURED you is one of the best books of the year? (hint: Yes.)

gods in Alabama retails for $19.95 and can be shipped by Priority Mail for $8.00 but there is PLENTY of time to get it shipped Media Mail rate which usually runs about $2.00 per copy. Signed first editions are a fantastic gift for the readers and/or book collectors in your life, and you'll ALSO be supporting, well, me. (We have to keep Maisy in 100 dollar Dance costumes, and uh-oh, here comes a digression: CAN YOU FREAKING BELIEVE??? 100 bucks for a THREE YEAR OLD'S BALLET COSTUME, due the same month as, gee, CHRISTMAS? Are you KIDDING ME???...As I was saying,...) You'll get a great gift for someone, and you'll literally be supporting me and a fantastic independent bookstore, AND Book Sense because gods was a Number One Book Sense pick! Which means it isn't JUST win-win, it's win-win-win-WIN. Heck, it's win-win--win-WIN in a 100 dollar Tutu that dern well BETTER come with a hat or some gold bullion.

Call the Alabama Booksmith BEFORE December 4th to get your order in:

(205) 870-4242

GO on, do it today, before you forget. They open in about FIFTEEN MINUTES! If you call NOW, I bet they will throw in some GINSU KNIVES or a fridge magnet. HECK, get two. They are small.

OH and when you call, be sure to tell them how you want it inscribed! ("Merry Christmas, Genny," for example, or perhaps something more personal, like, "For Peter, who was a complete testicle to his sister when they were children, but has grown up to be almost decent." Hey, whatever best says HOLIDAY CHEER to YOU, you know?)

We now return you to your regularly scheduled mindless prattle-slash-shennanigans:

---psychologically very important to me. I have this weird thing where, when I like someone's book, I so want them to like my book BACK. And Sheila Curran's book read to me like the book that would happen if Rachel Cusk's books had a baby with The Three Junes, so she was high on my "please read me back" list. I am sure this fits under some sort of pre-established and labelled co-dependent frippery mental illness umbrella, but I feel the phenomenon needs its own psycho-babble buzzword that catches the MEAT of the syndrome: how the anxiety and desire increases exponentially. In other words, the more I like a book, the more I want the writer to read mine, and the more important it is to me that they like it. It's the literary equivelent of passing that dork-note from eighth grade. You know the one:

DO YOU LIKE MY BOOK? PLEASE CHECK ONE: ___YES ___MAYBE ___WELL, IT'S NOT KING LEAR.

*sigh* Anyway. She liked it. SO THERE.

As God is my Witness...

...TODAY I will finish reading my proofs for Between, Georgia and sign off on them and get them over to Brown so I can pay 45 dollars to 2 day them instead of having to sell a kidney to get Brown to overnight them with an AM delivery.

...TOMORROW I will post this GREAT interview with Gayle Brandeis that I keep forgetting to post.

...I will BECOME A BETTER PERSON. And by this, I OBVIOUSLY mean lose five pounds. OR I could become, you know, kinder and gentler and less impatient and judgemental and not indulge my mental illness as if it were a yappy little pink purse dog and stop practicing my especial pet favorite sins with such unbridled relish and...nah. I will just lose five pounds.

...I will pick a final author for my TOP FIVE list I am doing for Mark Farley's charity project in the UK....SO far, when listing the Five Authors You Meet in Southern Heaven, I have:

Haven Kimmel -- The Solace of Leaving Early. I recently read in an interview that Kimmel considers herself a southern author, and I consider her to be the best writer alive, so she tops the list.

Cassandra King --- Making Waves. King's least known first novel may very well be my favorite of hers.

Flannery O'Conner --- Everything That Rises Must Converge. She's the best writer who isn't living.

Fred Willard -- Down on Ponce. Moody, funny, black, irreverent debut novel that is bound to offend MANY readers, but LORDY! That man can write an unreliable narrator like no one else.

My fifth would be Mindy Friddle, natch, but The Garden Angel is not out in the UK. Which, allow me to say here:

Dear UK,
BUY IT. The Garden Angel is SO awesome.
Love,
Joshilyn

SO barring Friddle, WHO AM I MISSING? WHy can;t I pick a FIFTH, and why does that question make me want to answer, "Sure I can pick a fifth. I pick...TEQUILA!"

...TODAY get a decent working Chapter 3 out of this salad of images and ideas and sentences and radishes. Okay there are no radishes. But if you begin with AS GOD IS MY WITNESS you have to get a radish in there somewhere because that's the dirty vegetable Scarlet yacks up onto the hillside at 12 Oaks right before she raises her fist to heaven and makes the vow. So.

The Word of the Day is in Your Pants

Oh we learn, we learn, we learn until we die. For example, I learned a new word last night. Callipygian. Say it with me...Cal,ee, PIDGE,un. Did you know that it means, "Having beautifully proportioned buttocks?" Hmm? Did you? Oh shut up, you did NOT.

Am I going to hell for getting tickled that the etymology of the word begins "from the Greek?" OR that the sentence in which dictionary.com chose to use the word is something like "the quest for the callipygian ideal?" Shut UP, I am NOT. Probably. Grail, Schmail, I am signing up for the tushie quest...Not sure how to begin. Just how would you QUEST for the loveliest buttocks? Probably in BARS. Bars that don't have enough seating.

After a long debate we decided that you can't use the word to modify buttocks because the buttocks are already implied in the main word. So don't go around saying anyone has "callipygian buttocks." You will just look foolish. People can be callipygian, as can statues, as can, apparently, ideals. In other words, Anything WITH buttocks can be callipygian, but the buttocks themselves cannot be unless the buttocks have buttocks of their own, in which case, allow me to say, "ew." I AM SO GLAD WE GOT THIS SETTLED!

In other news, I am not sure the newt-sacks are viable. We've been scooping them out and putting them down in the pond because Sam's heart was pierced with many knives when we broached the subject of releasing Fig and Spotty. He could not bear to lose Spotty, and then he worried that if we released only Fig, Spotty would PINE. I am not sure newts come standard with PINING EQUIPMENT. They have VERY small brains...how can they PINE EFFECTIVELY with the amount of software you can load onto their little teeny drives. But Sam has so much brain equipage that he can PROJECT pining upon them, so.

If Fig and Spotty lack PINING centers, at least they are FULLY equipped in their newtly pants. More egg sacks appeared. One or two a day. That may seem like a lot, but remember, these two live in a 5 gallon aquarium. What the heck ELSE is their to do? And perhaps Fig looks to Spotty like the Newtly embodiment of the callipygian ideal. SO the eggs piled up, and we scooped and released, we lathered, we rinsed, and we repeated. Then we kinda forgot about moving the egg sacks out. It fell off the radar. Who knows. Quite a few piled up in there, and now I just noticed 4 or 5 are gone. And yet I see no SPAWNS. Perhaps NEW newts are microscopic, or perhaps Daisy and Posy (the smaller, gill dependent, purely aquatic newtlets) are having omelets. I await further developments with baited breath.

Blah Blah Euphemism, Blah Blah Dog Toot

I am in Pensacola at my mom-in-laws---aka Nana. We drove down last night to set up her new computer (Scott) and fix whatever Ophelia broke (Scott) and speak at the Friends of the Library fundraiser (me) and spoil my children (Nana.) My children are in charge of eating too many Fritos and watching the movie ROBOTS over and over and over and over and over. We all have our assignments and we are all pleased with them.

Not to complain or anything...but the dulcet tones of Robin Williams ARE beginning to grate. Just a little. And not be judgemental, but when the four little eyeballs of my loin-fruit begin (INEVITABLY) to bleed from staring into the white light of the Holy Television, I am going to have to throttle myself with one of Scott's neckties AND throw myself into the sea to keep from warbling, I TOLD YOU THAT WOULD HAPPEN IF YOU DID NOT STOP. I SAID! DID I NOT SAY? Which is one of about 100 things I took a solemn vow to NEVER say when I was eight, and enraged, and people kept saying dumb stupid dumb stuff to me about would happen if I didn't blah blah this and stop blah blah-ing that. "Somthing actions, something something consequences," they said, nattering on like they KNEW when they didn't know REALLY, they were just SUPPOSING, and I was NOT going to fall ANYWAY, so I might as well run with a THOUSAND sticks in my mouth, geez.

WHAT IS GOOD: THE TIMES. I got a heads up from HODDER (my UK press). Remember gods in Alabama was The Times book club pick? WELL! I JUST SAW THE INITIAL REVIEW. It was, to appropriate some slang, BRILLIANT. My favorite line:

"...a fast paced thriller written so well that you think you are really reading a slow-burning novel."

That makes me all flushed and giddy, and ever since Scott read it to me, I have been marching around Nana's singing that line repeatedly to the tune of HAIL, BRITANNIA. By about the 4,000th repetition, I began to suspect my mother in law might SLIGHTLY prefer even the dulcet tones of RW. So I stopped. But to myself I am still singing it. Inside, where it counts.

HEY! LOOK! This is me in London standing under Hodder's sign outide their building, about to go be slightly intimidated by the excrutiatingly prettiness of my UK editor:

I include this picture for digressionary reasons that will become clear later but that WE SHALL NOT DISCUSS. In order to explain WHY we shall not discuss them, I offer up this Predigressionary Digression: I have weird notions of propriety. I will discuss ANYTHING in the general, a little less in the specific, and there are a few topics I prefer not to discuss at all in the specific as it pertains to me. So, for example, while I am happy to engage in lively bantersome exchanges about tooting, and while I agree that it is hilarious when the dog toots (especially if he then looks with comical surprise at his rear, as if asking the rear what that triumphant blowing fanfare was) I see no need to discuss whether or not I personally have ever experienced any untoward intestional gasses. I am sure that if such gasses did begin to amass themselves, the angels would come and carry them silently away before we EVER NEEDED TO TALK ABOUT IT. When certain discussions move from the general to the specific as it pertains to me, I get very flustered and displeased. SO. While the inclusion of this picture would make it very easy to move the discussion FROM the general TO the specific as it pertains to me when I begin my future digression, let's just not.

Let's speak in generalities. And if generalities should fail us, we shall always have euphemism to fall back on. I am ALL ABOUT ephemism. In fact, I have left specific instructions that the words VIVA LA EUPHEMISM be engraved upon my tombstone. SO. Here endeth the predrigressionary digression.

What is BAD: As you may have noticed from last week's rather quiet Kudzu, I am having BLOG BLOCK. I can't seem to BLOG. I sit down to blog, and then I have nothing to say, and I begin working on my novel instead. Or I wander off to peer at Samantha on DAYS OF OUR LIVES and call everyone I know to make THEM stare at her so we can speculate about whether or not she has had BREAST REDUCTION SURGERY.

I have two theories as to WHY. (Two theories about why I am blog blocked, not two theories about the WHY of breast reduction. OH! LOOK!

THE DIGRESSION YOU WERE FOREWARNED WAS COMING IS NOW HERE:

I KNOW all the why's of breast reduction, INTIMATELY, as does any general and not specific person who is both top heavy and athletic. These non-specific people have MEMORIZED the why's as they go back and forth about having it or not having it. The WHY's are practically engraved on their non-specific eyelids, everything from from back pain to black eyes, and they also know all the reasons why not, like the one in a million shot of being the one in a million person who dies on the table during BOOB SURGERY, absolutely GUARANTEEING that something OTHER than VIVA LA EUPHEMISM will be on their tombstone.

HERE ENDETH THE DIGRSSION!

So, two theories about the blog block....

Theory 1: I am REALLY tired. The stomach flu followed up by an overnight drive to Pensacola has sapped me of my Vital Essence-y Juices, and as soon as I get home and sleep for 7 illness-free hours in my own bed, I will be fine.

Theory 2: Scott is performing some sort of spooky ritual upon my hapless person as I sleep and SOUL SUCKING the SAUCINESS right out of me. I imagine the sauciness is an orange vapor that comes out of my mouth, and he hoovers it up into his nostrils with great sniffing horks and then says "AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

Theory one is PURE conjecture, and I am, after all, A SCIENTIST. So I have to give theory two more credence. See, I have EVIDENCE to support 2, which I present herewith: In recent days, while I have been saucelessly unable to find anything blogworthy, SCOTT HAS GOTTEN REALLY REALLY SAUCY. He is usually dry and witty with forays into the land of the wretched pun, but not SAUCY. He says he is not sucking the sauciness out of me, but if YOU were sucking the sauciness out of me, would you admit it? He attributes his new Hollandaisical Persona to my recent rash of shoe shopping.

Me: My shoe shopping? OH, blame the VICTIM, why don't ya. What does my admittedly out of control shoe shopping have to do with ANYTHING?
Him: You really haven't noticed?
Me: Noticed what?
Him: Every time you buy shoes, I **mow the lawn.** (By the by, for those who have not been keeping up, let me say that MOW THE LAWN is probably a euphemism. Those of you who HAVE been keeping up may now chime in with a hearty, "Um, duh.")

I was horrifed to realize he was RIGHT. Apparently, successful shoe shopping makes me REALLY want the lawn to look nice. I feel this is a connection that does not bear close examination, and am sticking with my SOUL SUCKING SAUCINESS NOSTRIL VAPOR theory.

PS. B4B Goes LIVE tomorrow afternoon.

In Which I Perish, but YOU Get Relatively Rich

Hi. I died of a stomach flu yesterday. I WOULD miss you all deep in my heart, but unfortuntely, I threw my heart up at about 3 PM. Along with my liver and several kidneys and all my bones. I am pretty much a deflated, heartless skin sack today.

School is indeed back in session! I declare this to be the first enterovirus of what promises to be an alternately mucus-laden and vomit-y school year. Good grief, but preschoolers are filthy and germy, and they eat chewed gum out of each other's mouths. I HAVE SEEN THEM DO IT. They cross germinate each other and come home SWARMING with multiple diseases, and then they call you MOMMY and have big eyes and smell good and you let them up into your lap like a moron where they entertain themselves by plunging their filthy fingers directly into your nose holes and giggling, "You have Nozrilts! You have Nozrilts!" Even the LAZIEST plagues can hope to get a good spread ratio if they recruit a pre-schooler.

I am going back to my bed of post-pain lolling as I have a signing at a local B and N tonight and need to get myself together (Don't worry, I have been Vomit Free for 20 hours now! Also, I plan to take a refreshing swim in some bleach and then spray eu de Lysol all over me in lieu of perfume before I go. So if you live here in town, COME. It s me and two other local authors--- I do not know WHO or WHOM though. (I am too weak to have good grammar. So shut yer pie holes.) I wonder who or whom they will be?!?!

It is the Barnes and Noble in Marietta at The Ave at West Cobb
(3625 Dallas Hwy SW). I will have LITTLE CHOCOLATES on my table. And FREE gods in Alabama refrigerator magnets! And I SWEAR I won't swap any bodily fluids with you!

Anyway, I am here, practically DEAD, but HERE, because wanted to POP UP THIS LINK for the writers out there. It is a short fic contest with an IMMEDIATE deadline, but a $3,000 prize, so if you HAVE a good story from 400 - 2500 words, go for it. Warning, a VERY l337 DeVVd coded the site. You need to be a 15 year old gameboy junkie with the reflexes of a bat to get the text to SCROLL to the short story info. GOOD LUCK!

REALLY if you have a piece ready, you should enter. 3k is a lot of MOO! That's like 50K in WRITER DOLLARS, which is sort of like DOG YEARS. Because, well, I have short stories I have worked on, on and off, for three years. So, 3k is not that much in the light of three years, but to get writer dollars, you have to figure out how much beer you could have bought with the sum over time, taking into account dollar draft nights, and then multiplying the total by the year the philistines made absinthe illegal.

ALSO, I wanted to pop up this link to Karin Gillespie's blog. She has a great interview up with Melanie Hauser. You remember, our first B4B judge? Wrote Confessions of Super Mom? This one:

Anyway, I enjoyed the interview and thought you might, too. That is all. *expires*

Things to Think About, Look At, and Consider

Think about this: A week from TODAY, we begin the October edition of Blogging for Books. If you are a Johnny-or-Janey come lately, it's a writing contest invented by The Zero Boss, and a click here will getcha to the original rules.

October's special guest blogger will be Kira of KiWords. She will narrow the entries down to seven.

October's special guest author will be Jennifer O'Connell.

The winner gets an autographed copy of Jennifer's new book, Off the Record. It's the story of Jane Marlow, a true-blue good girl: plain, predictable, and perfectly responsible. But when her brother catches an episode of Music One's "Off the Record," he discovers that former pop sensation Teddy Rock is actually their childhood neighbor Theodore Brockford, and that his one-hit wonder twelve years earlier wasn't just a catchy tune that took the charts by storm-it was a song about Jane. What would happen if the world discovered you inspired a legendary rock song? Jane Marlow is about to find out...

Kirkus says, �It's decadent fun... O'Connell makes this sweet treat go down smoothly thanks to snappy dialogue and evocative scenes of Chicago in the summer.� And Kirkus would know. BIG HINTY NOTE FOR ASPIRING SMARTY-PANTSES LOOKING FOR A LEG UP IN THE CONTEST: The essay topic is often thematically linked to the prize book.

Here ends the thinking, so now, Look at this:

I'm getting one for Christmas.

My brother is sculpting a fox right now, and he was googling around for images of foxes, and...this came up. We cannot come up for any possible uses for this that aren't too perverted to look at at head on. They are the sort of thing one reluctantly peeps at sideways and then you shudder and run. This hat...is inherently deviant. That is all.

Here ends the looking, so now, consider this: So I've written this book, right, and it is a HARD BOOK TO SUMMARIZE. gods in Alabama has a structure that allows me to say three sentences about it and you have an immediate idea of what you might be getting into and whether or not it's your sort of thing. Between, Georgia....it's not possible. By which I mean, I haven't found a way to do it yet. I had a one paragraph jacket copy kinda thing on the Between page, but it didn't, catch the essence of what the book is ACTUALLY about. So I have rewritten it without limiting myself to four sentences, and just tried to ACTUALLY SAY what the book is about. It took me four paragraphs.

Here's the new Summary for BETWEEN, GEORGIA.

After you read it, you will have a pretty good idea of what the book is about. SO! If you THEN have any thoughts about how to CATCH what the book is about in a 30 second sound bite, or even an opinion about WHAT elements would be most ear catching in a thirty second sound bite, then, please...share. Because I learned with gods that when someone asks, "SO WHAT IS IT ABOUT," I have about half a minute to get them interested enough to maybe go pick it up and read the jacket copy and see if it's the book for them.

Jennifer's book, above, has a great summary. You read that, and you can say, "Oh I want to check into that. I like snappy 'what if' books." Or you may say, "Hmm that sounds like it needs more spies and some gunplay..." I need a thirty second summary that can help the right readers for this book find it. And summarizing THIS book THAT fast looks to me to be the three minute mile----completely impossible without the aid of pharmecueticals. Whoopsie, no, I actually mean, completely impossible right up until someone does it.

Yes, Virginia, it IS a contest!

Over at The Zero Boss, there used to be a great contest called Blogging for Books. The Boss, he got busy, and he isn't having it, no, nevermore. I judged it once. Heck, I entered it once, and did not win, even though I entered what is probably my all time favorite blog entry ----the one where me and Joyce Carol Oats make out with a flight attendant who looks like Michael Chabon while crammed in an airplane restroom....ANYWAY. I hate to see a good contest die, so I am going to guest host it for a couple of months, until he comes to his senses and yoinks it back.

I hope I will be able to keep it going, but it IS time consuming. And In my copious spare time, I like to blink and go to the bathroom. Most days I have to choose between the two, because I can so seldom fit them BOTH in. Several enterprising souls have suggested I COMBINE blinking and going to the bathroom into a single, mega-fun leisure activity. It would be a lot like extreme sports, but with Charmin. I confess I have doubts. I am not quite co-ordinated enough for that.

So since I myself am well acquainted with THE BUSY, I have come up with a solution. DELEGATE! In The Zero Boss version of Blogging for Books (or B4B, as we in-the-know hipsters like to call it), he personally culled all the entries down to seven, and then a Special Guest Novelist would pick the winners in the traditional first, second, and third places. Since I am about to make like a lidless WASP and be thinking of England without having to close my eyes (because England will be all around me. It's hard NOT to think of England when you are standing in the middle of it, looking at it. It's impossible not to, actually. It would be like not thinking of the elephant. You know, once someone says DO NOT THINK OF THE ELEPHANT you immediately think of him. I bet you are thinking of the elephant right now...) ANYWAY! I am going to have a special guest blogger make the initial cut to seven. I may keep this feature, actually, and host a different novelist and blogger every month because I am not ready to completely forego blinking and the bathroom, and because, hey, there are some mighty fine bloggers out there that could use a little linky love, too.

Lord, I maybe shouldn't be in charge of this. I can't even get through the RULES without digressing my way into WASP mating rituals and elephants, which usually have VERY little to do with each other. Thankfully.

ANYWAY, B4B is COMING, so brace yourself, Bridget. Here's how it will work....

On the first Monday of the month (That's five days from now, Virginia...) I'll post a TOPIC. You then have until midnight on the FOLLOWING Monday to post a blog entry (no more than 2,000 words, please) about that topic on YOUR blog. A SPECIAL GUEST BLOGGER will narrow the entries down to seven, and a SPECIAL GUEST AUTHOR will pick the winning three. First Place gets a signed first edition of the GUEST AUTHOR'S latest work and The Adoration of the Masses�, and the runners up get...um...let's say, some respect and The Mild Crush of the Masses�. Here's the FAQ, and the answer to whatever question you are currently experiencing probably resides there. Unless it is a question about The Elephant---oh look, you just thought of him AGAIN!

September's SPECIAL GUEST AUTHOR is: Melanie Lynn Hauser, author of Confessions of Super Mom

September's SPECIAL GUEST BLOGGER is: Mir, of Would Coulda Shoulda (The natural choice, as she was the first ever winner of the first ever B4B contest.)

PS: Zero Boss used to have a kindly person who would post essays from NON-BLOG-HAVING would-be winners who wanted to write an essay and enter. I need such a person for here. If you are him/her, say so. We will all think you are pretty.
PPS: Any smarty-pants worth his/her standardized test results can probably get a JUMP ON THE GAME by figuring out what the contest topic will be.
PPPS: A hint to what the topic will be is in the above links.
PPPPS: Um, no. NOT the Joyce Carol Oats/Mile High club link.
PPPPPS: You filthy-minded thing.

Sign In, Sign On, Sign Out

I have correspondence now.

IMMEDIATE DIGRESSION: This blog is supposed to be about "how do you and how should I sign off on letters" and you know what? I need to take a poll pretty much, because it seems to me there is not a very good way to close a letter. SO, I am going to get there. Eventually. But I typed, "I have correspondence now" and my brain started yammering about GODS HAS BEEN OUT FOR SEVERAL MONTHS AND THE NEW HAS COME OFF AND IS MY LIFE DIFFERENT? Subquestions: IF NO, WHY NOT and IF YES, HOW, and a partial answer to that question is in the spawning thought, aka: I have correspondence now.

I have not had CORRESPONDENCE, really, since I got to the 337th of the 350 thank you notes* I owed the Universe after my LARGE! TRADITIONAL! SOUTHERN! WEDDING!, and by this I mean, we did it RIGHT with the registering at Dillard's, and a shrimp tree at the reception, and the 5 foot by 4 foot bridal portrait in a HUGE gilded frame that still hangs all oil-paint-sheened and proper in my mother's formal living room, and I got a PAPER TROUSSEAU okay?

Half of you don't even know what a paper trousseau is, and in a way, I envy you this, because I was the victim of a large and formal southern wedding,** which means I have several complete sets of china in various patterns and formal-ness levels, and so the Paper Trousseau was put to immediate post-wedding use...and use and use and use and use and use, thank you note after thank you note on the heavy, creamy, embossed and monogrammed paper, until the day came when I threw my pen across the room and hurled myself weeping onto the carpet where I foamed and writhed like worm dropped onto a hot griddle.

Scott took my chair and started to write the last notes for me, but I howled, NO NO THE BRIDE HAS TO DO IT!! STOP! STOP! and banged my head on the floor, and then he leaned down and whispered six beautiful words to me. At the time I felt they must be the most beautiful words in the English language. I mean, they weren't anything special, really, but to my bleeding ears they were a love song, a poem, a freakin' a SHAKESPEARE sonnet, and they cemented my permanent gratitude and guaranteed my affections would linger for a thousand years, should we live so long: "Baby," he said to me, "I can forge your signature."

As we loaded the last of the thank you notes into the mailbox together, I clutched his arm and said, "WE CAN NEVER GET DIVORCED. EVER. Because eventually, I would get remarried, and some cruel vartlet would feel the need to present me and my new husband with some sort of PLATE, and as GOD IS MY WITNESS, I can never write a thank you note for a plate again. I will DIE. I will literally have a brain spasm and drop lifeless to the floor. Immediately. There are only so many ways one can enthusiastically and with different grammar and reasoning express one's delight over a salad, dinner, or dessert plate, and Baby, I have been down every possible avenue of plate-delight-expressing. I can be delighted by plates nevermore. SO. No divorce, and PS, I get to die first."*

Of course that's a facile answer, and I think I am going to try to answer this question MORE BETTER over the next week (unless, of course, something shiny runs by. Something wearing pink socks, maybe??? Heh.) But no, it's worth blogging about I think especially with this DREAM trip coming up and because it is becoming a(n) FAQ. SO I WILL. But today I am concerned about letter closers because one thing that IS different is I have so much more GENUINE correspondence, and by that I mean, things that need to be written on pretty paper with a black pen and sealed and stamped and sent via boats and ponies to

1) Weird Luddite Friends who refuse to acknowledge THERE IS AN INTERNET NOW. Or
2) Folks in my business who have been so beautiful and kind to me that e-mail won't do. Or
3) People who enjoyed the book and were thoughtful enough to tell me so in writing on stationary. Or
4) Warner or Conference/Event people who need a real actual signature on a paper contract. Or
5) Folks who are also being mailed an object that cannot be sent electronically, like a signed copy of gods for a charity auction.

And I never know how to sign off on these things. Here are the choices so far:

ALL BEST --- In New York, they almost all use ALL BEST, or BEST, or some variation thereof. It's like a secret New York insider sign off. I've seen it on letters from a HORDE of established authors and agents and editors (I get letters from them asking for blurbs) and publicists. I picked it up and used it for a bit, and still do every now and again because...okay this is SO dorky. But. It makes me feel cool. Cool like Fonzi, you know, like I am In Crowdy and can take meetings in the bathroom. But....It's like trying on Prada: Sexy as all get out, but in a playing-dress-up way. Not my real life. Not my real verbiage. I can't take myself seriously when I use it because I KNOW I am just frontin' like a playa, which is another thing I can't say and take myself seriously.

WARMLY --- This is new---seems to be the new trendy way for WOMEN to sign off. I am seeing this a LOT and it seems friendly and personal, which I like, but but somehow the word "Warmly" has bad connotations for me. It makes me think of "MOISTLY" and "DAMPLY" and the hot, pale, sweat-dewed palms of the kind of puffy-handed man that ALWAYS puts a hand on the small of your back as he ushers you into a room, and you KNOW later you will find a damply creased print of his covert pawings on the silk. YARG! Yes. It is a personal problem. So, nice as "warmly" is, it isn't for me.

SINCERELY --- See also Cordially, Regards, and Best Regards. The old standby business closers. Too stiff and formal.

CHEERS --- Cheerful, also friendly, but sounds like I would rather be drinking. Which is probably be true, but do I have to let everyone KNOW that? Also it may be too INFORMAL and chatty and perky and... NOT BRIGHT? Like I bet if DOGS wrote letters they would sign them "CHEERS!" right before becoming so excited about the WALK! to the MAILBOX! that they pee all over the carpet.

YOURS --- I like yours, but only if I feel a personal connection with the person. It's too INFORMAL for regular use.

So far Cheers is winning....What do you use? What am I MISSING? Do you even NOTICE closers? Obviously, I do....Oh well. Suggestions appreciated.

* If you attended my LARGE! TRADITIONAL! SOUTHERN! WEDDING! and gave me, God help you, a plate, let me just reiterate that in spite of the hyperbolic plate vitriol I spewed above, I DID appreciate your thoughtfulness, and if I did not write your thank you note FIRST, then I heartily apologize for whatever addled mush I spewed at you about it on my paper trousseau. Sample:

Dear Friend and/or Relation!

Scott and I are ecstatic with the crisp elegance of the Lennox McKinley Salad Plate you so thoughtfully bestowed upon our plate-less home! We like to sit around and take turns licking it! Sometimes, I will hide it behind my back and suddenly spring it on him, just WHIP IT OUT, you know, and he will fall to his knees, blinded by its....did I say crisp elegance already?? ANYWAY! THANK YOU! You have a beautiful white soul!

Love! (Or Yours Or perhaps Cordially!)
Joshilyn and Scott!

It was only that I wanted you to have an INDIVIDUAL, SPECIAL NOTE ALL YOUR OWN, a note in which I did not say to you something I had already said to someone else. I hate form letters, even hand written ones. And

** I know I said "victim of a large traditional southern wedding" but that was, for the record, a joke. I loved my wedding. I, in fact, ADORED my wedding and would do it again exactly the same, yes, even the pink bridesmaids dresses, even the circlet of roses headpiece, yea down unto the very last shrimp on the shrimp tree, and you know what? I STILL FREAKING LOVE THOSE MCKINLEY PLATES! AND THEY ARE CRISPLY ELEGANT. So. There.

Call Me Bucky Beaver Busy-Pants. No Wait. Don't.

OKAY I am 500 years behind on email and life and everything else, so if you e-mailed me in the last 2 weeks and are wondering if I died...I didn't. This is me, typing from NOT the beyond. I WILL catch up this weekend, it's only that I am just trying to get ready to leave the country and really, it's amazing the crap that needs to get done. This morning I hope to at some point clean at least one spoon and a bowl so I can have some breakfast, but if I do not, I guess it's fine because also on my list here for things to do by 2 PM this afternoon I see "lose five pounds and then go buy a cocktail dress." So.

My part of the auction to raise money for Marianne Mancusi went for like 500 bucks... THANK YOU NICE, BIDDER. That's like half a refrigerator! I am going to compose a song in your honor, tentatively titled, "Nice Bidder, You Are Awesome."

Me? I am intimidated.

Last night I said, to Scott, "This song about the nice bidder is not very good so far. Maybe it has too many notes? Maybe I should learn to play an instrument and also get a drop of musical talent? GAH, okay crit and book, but I can't think of anything I could do for this person that would be worth 500 bucks.
Scott: Well, I can. But if you did it, I would be mad.
Me: I'm sorry, was that a joke? Because I didn't get it. Could you say it again? Slower? In a really deep voice, kinda like Barry White?

Note to Mom: WAS that a joke? Because I REALLY did not get it. Pinky swear.

Three Random Neurons Firing

1) I need two simple, small things to be completely happy for the rest of my life: A Quadspillion Dollars and for the powers that be to build a Whole Foods near me. OR actually, since I am going to have a Quadspillion dollars, the Whole Foods can stay where it is. I can just hire a man to drive me to Whole Foods and stand outside (sweating up the livery and holding my obligatory purse-dog) while I spend 20 bucks on a a pound and a half of organic cherries. OR I can buy a a small in-town home, like a FUNKISH LOFT that I can stay in when I venture into Atlanta to buy the cherries. We will "winter" in Maui, "summer" in Provence, and "Grocery" at Whole Foods. *sigh*

ACTUALLY I just need a 300 dollar a week grocery budget, which I can easily arrange to have by simply not paying my mortgage anymore. We will live in a box, but LORDY we will eat like KINGS!

HEY! NEW DIET!!! Want to eat yourself sick and still lose a pound in three days? All you have to do is sell some plasma and then go to Whole Foods and get the grilled asparagus salad, Vegetarian Stuffed Portabellos, Organic Cherries, Rudi's bread, Smoked Salmon Salad, a box of Cheese Crabby-Crab Spicy Mushroom Thing, and a lot of bottles of Mandarin orange Sparkling Mineral Water and red wine (for the anti-oxidants and the....Kira told me red wine has something else good in it. Like...I want to say "Funkanoids." That can't be right, can it? Funkanoids? Or maybe Flavonots? SOMETHING--I don't know what it is called or what it purportedly DOES for your healthiness, but Kira says it is GOOD FOR YOU and it is in RED WINE and so I choose to believe her. Fervently.) Eat all this stuff for three days, eat until you are SICK, eateateateat, screaming in ecstasy after every bite, then get tremulously on the scale after the 3 day party-of-eating is over and lo and behold. You'll be down a pound. Maybe screaming is ecstasy is aerobic? Whatever. Just sell the plasma.

2) Scott and I were sitting in the office trying to decide what plays we want to see in London (We are thinking ON THE CEILING and maybe THEATER OF BLOOD, but for the record we are BLACKLY SAD that THE TEMPEST is playing at the Globe the day before we arrive and the day after we leave but NOT ONCE while we are in town, and Kevin Spacey won't be Richard the Thirding while we are there either, BAH!) Sam was with us. SUDDENLY! We heard the unmistakable crash of glass shattering on a hardwood floor. The sound came from the dining room, and it was followed by a conspicuous silence.

I ran across the hall, yelling, "MAISY JANE, DO NOT MOVE! DO NOT TAKE ONE STEP!" because I knew that she was barefoot. We skidded to a stop and there stood our daughter, frozen in place, entirely surrounded by the remains of a crystal pitcher. She looked up at us, wide-eyed with panic, and before either of us could say a word, she hollered, "IT BROKE-DED BY IT'S OWN!"

I had to IMMEDIATELY turn my back and let Scott handle it because it would have been deadly to let her see that that I was practically suffocating myself trying not to laugh.

3) In the car, Kira and Mir and I were listening to a CD called THE PATRIARCH'S ONE TRUE PLAN or something. I got it for Scott to listen to, because it's a very handy instruction manual you men can use to stamp out vile feminism before it infests your home, and also explains why it is morally wrong to use birth control. Scott should just insist that I have as many babies as God wants me to have. Also, I should stop with all the BOOK WRITING NONSENSE because that's not actually very fulfilling for me like 12 or 14 babies would be. It was being handed out for free by a Concerned Citizen, and after I had heard it once and THOROUGHLY enjoyed the BIZARRO way the speaker pauses in between entirely inappropriate words (SAMPLE. AND!...THE MAN ...MUST!... SAY TO HIS...FAMILY! I...Have A...PLAN!!...AN UNDERSTANDING!..OF!...TRUTH!...Like THE PATRIRACHS!....OF!...THE OLD TEST!...AMENT!! etc etc) I REALLY wanted Scott to hear it too. I had this plan where I was going to be very sincere and ask him to listen to it and act like I thought it was all very smart and nifty, and see how long it took him to clue in that his chain was being yanked.

Alas, it never got out of the box. I oversold it---made the mistake of calling it "Life Altering " Scott immediately got the skeptical eyebrows and said, "Yeah. That's what they told the cat before his operation, baby. I'll pass."

SO ANYWAY, Mir and Kira and I were listening to it in the car and Mir was all, "They need to put this to MUSIC!" And you know, it DOES have kind of a catchy backbeat what with all the odd long pauses. And we listened a little more...

Preacher: AND! ... The Patriarch!... WENT DOWN!...
Kira: Suddenly I feel more amenable towards this whole "Patriarch" movement.
Preacher: ...INTO EGYPT!
Kira: Oh. Never mind.

We are all three going to hell...

Bloggus Interruptus

To answer the foreign rights questiosn that have popped up in comments:
YES gods in Alabama is being translated into Thai! I And Spanish and French and Swedish--I just got a note from the Swedish Transslator, asking what a GULCH PARTY is. Hehe.

YES|, All these editions WILL have their own covers, and I can not WAIT to see them. I'll post them here as they begin to exist. The mills of publishing grind slowly...

The UK edition uses the same cover as the American one. Hodder (my publishing house) tried a few things, but ended up getting permission from Warner to use Anne Twomey's cover, which on the one hand was disappointing because I thought it would be rather fun to have another cover, BUT on the other hand...I can't blame them. Anne Twomey is a freakin' genius. The colors, and the way she captures the feel/themes of the book without being too literal...When I first saw it I pretty much wept and began to build a temple for her in my backyard. She did the cover for Between Georgia, too, I am ECSTATIC to tell you, and I should be able to show that to you VERY soon. It's...awesome. She deserves Godiva chocolates and a ticker tape parade and a pony.

*ten minutes later* WOW, just as I typed the word pony, the doorbell rang. It was a package---my AUTHOR COPIES of the UK edition! HUZZAH! I will have to think of a contest to win a signed one of these soon...

*30 minutes later* OH WOW but this blog entry is diffused, As i was typing about the package, an e-mail came for me. It is going into my PEOPLE TO INVESTIGATE SHOULD I TURN UP DEAD file. Some guy wants me to use my PRODIGIOUS influence in L.A. to help him get a pilot made for his TV show idea that he based on this dream he had, but he can't tell me about the dream OR the TV show because, although he is sure I am a good person, I would probably steal it. I wouldn't be able to help myself. The idea is JUST that good. If I help him, later he might let me write the pilot for him. SO! Could I make some phone calls on his behalf? THANKS!

So I did...
I called my friend Jill and told her of my new TV project, and how I have to this week in my copious spare time get a pilot made for a show idea that I don't know what it is because I would steal it. Jill is going to call her very good friend Bruce Willis, just as soon as she meets and befriends him, and we decided to cast NAKED TAYE DIGGS in every part, because, hey, I would watch that show. So would you. Admit it. (Can you tell I just re-watched Chicago?)

The best part of the conversation:

Me -- Oh well, you know, they LOVE me in L.A., if "they" refers to "the restroom attendent at the 4 Seasons that I accidentally tipped 20 bucks because I was hooty." So. I prolly COULD get the pilot made for him. IF I FELT LIKE IT.
Jill -- OH! OH! OH! YOU ROCK STAR!! YOU CAN CURE POVERTY AND HUNGER AND CAUSE SWIRLED PEAS!!!

That put me on the floor. ..... CAUSE SWIRLED PEAS!!! Funny every time. But it led to this conversation:

Me -- *laugh choke laugh weep choke* OMG Except...*hitching gulps* Okay. OMG. Ok. Except... what is swirled peas?
Jill -- You know, swirled peas.
Me -- No. I don't know.
Jill -- Yes, you do. You know. Swirled peas?
Me--- Um, no.

Jill is from Colorado. They do weird stuff to produce there, apparently. What are you going to do?

A Demise Postponed

I lived.

It was actually very very very fun, the whitewater rafting. They had this one spot where they took a picture, and I meant to go buy it for the blog, but I forgot to even go look at it. I was tired! But it's okay because my brother (who may I remind you MAKES HIS LIVING, I mean, actually FEEDS HIS FA