Probably none of this bothered you at all, because you were too busy wondering the same things as everyone else: does Jodi live in a mansion, or is she just really hard on couches? And why do Lu’s answers make one feel so depressingly inadequate?

This final bit is entirely unrelated, but as long as I am up, allow me to offer some guidance on a matter that seems to have discombobulated the media. I am speaking, of course, of rompers—specifically about who ought to be wearing them. Personally, I would have thought that the name alone would be enough to clear up any confusion (How old are you? Would you say that you romp, nowadays? I thought not.)

Alas, this is not the case, and so I offer a photograph of a romper in—or on—its natural habitat:

You’re welcome.

There have been so many unlikely and strange developments in this exchange over the past half-decade that I am not sure where to begin discussing it—with the fact that blogging is a THING now, that people no longer uniformly regard as a sort of electronic literary streak across the quad (though it may be that, sometimes)? With the fact that blogging is viewed as a moneymaking enterprise? With the fact that, to the general public, the acceptableness of blogging is seemingly in direct proportion to this aforementioned compensatory aspect? Or with the way the intersection of opportunity and something else has conspired to make the idea of a hobby seem quaint and obsolete?

I think about that last one a lot. With Etsy and Websites and Paypal oh my, an unprecendented number of people are being paid for their knitting or painting or whittling or whatever it is they used to do for sport. This is undoubtedly a wonderful development, a development that allows me to buy all manner of covetable handmade items without leaving my home, but it has also created a sense that one should be selling and publicizing and, I’ll say it, MONETIZING (it sounds like spinning straw into gold! Possibly very apropos!) one’s every avocation. It’s an odd world for the lazy and dilettantish among us, I must admit.

But back to the point: five years. Sixty months. Where has the time gone? What have I done with it?

Children conceived: 3
Live babies acquired: 1
Men married: 1
Apartments lived in: 4
Books written: 1
Degrees acquired: 0
Unfamiliar countries visited: 1
Unfamiliar states visited: 1
Couches owned: 3
Pets felled by disease/neglect: 0
Days admitted to hospital: 16
Literary rejections received: 3(?)
Pounds gained: 20
Kidney stones passed: 2
Correspondence unanswered, television hours consumed, friends made, perspective granted, and storms weathered: all too great to measure with current technology.

Your turn.

“I wish I had a million dollars,” she says, apropos of nothing and everything, “If I just had a million dollars, everything would be great.”
Her husband pauses the television.
“No, it wouldn’t.”
“I said ‘great,’ not ‘perfect.’ I know money has limitations, but in this case it would solve all of my major problems.”
“And you’d need a million dollars.”
“Fine, 500,000.”
“There is no way that you are suddenly going to get your hands on $500,000.”
“300,000. That’s my final offer. That’s as low as I can go.”
“I’m not—”
“10,000. 10,000 dollars.”

A few minutes later, her husband reaches for the remote. She muses aloud:

“We should get a metal detector. I’ll bet there’s all kind of valuable stuff around here. It’s one of the oldest neighborhoods in St. Paul. We could find F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, like, fountain pen. He lived down the block, you know.”
“And you think F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fountain pen is just lying in the grass somewhere?”
She snorts.
“Well, no. We’d have to dig, obviously.”
“How would we know it was his?”
“It would say.”
“It would say. It would be labeled? It would say ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Fountain Pen?”’
“No! God! Don’t be stupid. It would say ‘Scott Fitzgerald,’ or something. Engraved. Or maybe we’d take it to an antique dealer and they’d recognize it from an old photograph.”
“Uh Huh. Maybe we’ll find F. Scott Fitzgerald’s rare old 50-cent piece, too.”
“Oh, stop. Now you’re just being silly.”

She’s quiet again for a while. But not long enough:

“I mean think about it. Think how many pens we lose.”
“Simone,” the man mutters.
“Even before her. We must lose dozens of pens a year! Why should things have been any different back then? And HE was probably DRUNK, knowing him. We can figure it out with Math. If we calculate how many pens we lose a year on average and how many years F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in the neighborhood…the place must be CRAWLING with pens! People would pay for those,” the woman finishes, sagely, adjusting her underpants.
“And he lost all these pens outside, did he?”
“Maybe they fell through the floorboards. And then there is erosion, or a mouse carries them out.”
“A mouse carries them out.”
“Where are OUR pens? You explain it. I’m just saying: metal detector. It would be an investment.”

I have several entries percolating that I haven’t had time to finish—and am a little afraid to finish, honestly, because then I’ll have to post them and at least one is the written equivalent of a impotent foot stomp and sometimes, looking back at my five years of writing online I worry that the one overarching theme, the constantly percolating and reappearing motif, the mode subtending my entire electronic oeuvre, such as it is, is auditory: namely a whiny, nasal “iiiiiiiiiihhhhhhhhh!” of complaint. This troubles me.

But, believe it or not, this is not a complaining post! This is a post about something that makes me very, very happy. Happier, even, than the fact that whenever she sees the below picture Simone says—with a touching certainty—“MOM.”

{fig. 1: I carry it around now, to show to her whenever I need a pick me up.}

(For the record, it would be difficult for me to look LESS like Keira Knightley than I do already without serious, and possibly surgical, effort.)

To get to the point, I am delighted to tell you that there are now actual, honest-to-god events on the books for an actual, honest-to-god book tour. I will be at BlogHer from August 5th through the 8th, and then POW! the very next day:

Monday, August 9th
Iowa City, Iowa
Prairie Lights Bookstore
7:00 p.m.
Reading, Q&A, Signing

Prairie Lights is quite possibly my favorite bookstore. It’s in my book, even, and seems a fitting place for a first event. Though I feel a little faint when I read this.

(STREAMING OVER THE WORLD WIDE WEB! That means live, people. Need I remind you that I am not at my best live?)

The next day, my book is officially on sale. In stores. Of course, BlogHer attendees will be able to buy it ahead of time, at the conference bookstore (I hope—still waiting for confirmation) and if you show up at my Iowa City reading there will be copies there. But Tuesday the tenth is THE DAY, and I will probably celebrate by—well, first by driving home from Iowa, but then by drinking champagne with my cousin Amy and showing up at local bookstores with a pen. And a photo ID, so as to avoid charges of vandalism.

My official local release event is the day after that:

Wednesday, August 11th
St. Paul, Minnesota
Common Good Books
7:30 p.m.
(Exciting details forthcoming, but that is a whole other post.)

And then my schedule looks like this:

Thursday, August 12th
Chicago, IL
Women and Children First Books
7:30 p.m.

Thursday, August 19th
Seattle, WA
University Bookstore
7:00 p.m.

Do you notice the part about being in three different cities in three days? I’ve never done that! In fact, I have never been in three cities in three months, even, unless you count layovers, or my home-city, which I do not. I might as well admit that when I first saw the itinerary I thought it was odd that I was scheduled in BOTH Portland and Seattle because…well, because I thought they were more or less the same place. Like Minneapolis and St. Paul, or D.C. and Arlington, and thus everyone who would want to come to see me would show up on Wednesday in Portland leaving noone to come the next night in Seattle. (You can laugh at me, if you like. Heather already did.) Geography has never been my subject. I have many talents, but knowing where Kansas lies (East of me? West?) is not one of them. I am excellent at reading maps, however. A good thing, too.

The West coast part of the tour is especially exciting to me because I’ve never been to any of these places. I mean, I was in San Francisco when I was five, but that was a quarter of a century ago, and I mostly remember the wedding—my wedding, to my god…brother? Awful sounding, yes, but he was only the son of my godparents, so no real, incest-y relation. We were married in the living room of his parents’ house, He-Man peeking out from between the lapels of his father’s tuxedo jacket, my gown an adult-sized “Oh No, It’s Mr. Bill!” t-shirt turned inside out (borrowed AND blue!) For a veil, I wore a lacy nightgown on my head, and our rings were plastic and featured characters from Disneyland. In the picture (which I do not have, or I would scan it for you), Beau (my husband) looks properly gleeful and five-year-old-ish, whereas I look inappropriately solemn and have one hand over my heart. The other hand is reverently displaying the ring (Goofy, I believe).
That isn’t really a “city-specific” memory, as you can see, and though I also have vague impressions of beautiful bay scenery and houses arranged below us like colorful stair steps, I consider myself a San Francisco virgin. Now, when I think of San Francisco, I think “Holly Lives There! And Moose! And Leah! When I think of Portland/Seattle—because let’s be honest, until a few days ago I thought of them as a single unit—I think immediately of Linda.

(All three cities, incidentally, are on my list of Places I Would Live If Only. Portland and Seattle look beautiful, and Scott and I are constantly tempted when we see them on television, but they don’t get enough sun to keep us from taking our own lives. San Francisco seems perfect, save for the whole dropping-into-the-ocean thing. We talk a lot about moving to another stop on the tour—Chicago, and though I have never really explored the city beyond its center, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if we end up there eventually. It is urban but near family, it has the lake and public transportation. Oh, how I long for public transportation!)

With such a gap between Chicago and San Francisco I am thinking I should spend an extra day in least one of those places to explore, or something, because won’t going home in between just be jarring? I’d have to leave Simone all over again, and it adds a whole other flight. On the other hand, the extra flight expense is probably less than extra lodging, and if I DON’T go home, I have to pack for a million days, probably without checking a bag. And it’s not like the extra days will be in a city like New York, one I know well and in which I have many friends to occupy me. On a third, anatomically anomalous hand, there is something appealing about turning the whole Chicago-through-Seattle leg into one long multi-stop trip instead of coming and going and packing and un- in the middle of it all.

I don’t know yet where I will be staying, because I feel so lucky to be getting a tour at all (if you follow publishing news, you know that you don’t even have to play anything backwards to hear BOOK TOURS ARE DEAD ABORT ABORT APOCALYPSE!) that I am trying to save money for my publisher by finding cheap places to stay whenever possible—you know, youth hostels, the homes of strangers I find on Craigslist. (Kidding! Kind of.) This will help me feel slightly less guilty if no one shows up to the readings, and hopefully keep open the possibility of more events in the future.

I am starry-eyed at the prospect of going to new places with new bookstores and meeting new people and thanking my readers up close and in person. All of these events will have a reading and signing, per usual (she says as if this sort of thing is old hat, as if she has ANY IDEA AT ALL what part of the book she will be reading), and all feature a Q&A. Please come, if you are nearby, and during the Q&A ask me something I know, like Where Was I Born? (Boston!) or Do I Care For Hockey? (No!)
While I am understandably clammy at the prospect of standing up in front of as many as HALF A DOZEN people, reading from my book and then enduring a Pop Quiz, worse still would be if nobody comes at all and it is just me and my Media Consort (that doesn’t sound right—escort, maybe?) surrounded by angry bookstore employees. So please, if you live in or near one of these (presumably) fine cities, come and see me! It would be so wonderful if you were to come! I want to meet you! Please! Come! Please come!

(And for those of you willing to show up, I have a few suggestions for how you can help my readings seem less sparsely populated. I have already talked to my friends and family about this, and it’s simple, really. The main thing is to bring a lot of props—scarves, hats, fake mustaches, that sort of thing—and keep changing them up while milling around in a busy fashion, to approximate a crowd. If two or three of you are doing that, I figure it will look like a good ten or fifteen people. This is especially important for the local event, because I have a secret fear that I am not going to be able to get people to come to an event even in my own hometown, and then I will be driven out and deposited outside the city borders, exiled and pitied.)

Wherever I am, I sincerely hope to see some friendly blog-reader-y faces (under the scarves and mustaches, I mean), and I’d love to have some sort of bloggy meet-ups–perhaps after each event we could all retire to my hostel hotel for a pickpocketing sidecar? I’ll let you locals suggest the details, maybe.

UPDATE: If your city isn’t on the list, you can vote to have it included below. (Link is also in the sidebar.)

The reasonable do not believe that antibiotics are Out to Get Them. Should they be prescribed amoxicillin for a sinus infection, their third in a year after nearly three decades of pristine and healthy sinuses, they are not inspired to concoct elaborate conspiracy theories, nor are they heard to remark tearfully about their health Obviously Going Rapidly Downhill, and Probably It Won’t Be Long Now.

Yea, though it was a full week ago, the reasonable have no trouble remembering “what it feels like to be well.”

The reasonable see no reason why two months of immunological pratfalls shouldn’t be coincidence, and are not disposed to sudden wee-hour convictions that their children’s current illness will one day be looked back upon as a warning sign they tragically ignored.

The reasonable do not ask their significant others to lay a hand upon their foreheads every quarter of an hour to confirm that they are still, indeed, warmish.

The reasonable do not find that spending all this time in bed makes one really crave madeleines, nor would they rationalize a sudden spike in cake consumption by remarking upon the body’s ability to communicate its dietary needs, for the reasonable would know better than to entertain the specious premise that whipped cream has antiseptic properties on a cellular level.

The reasonable would spend more time catching up on correspondence and less wondering whether, if they WERE dying, some foundation might work on their behalf to entice members of various World Cup teams (a proportional international contingent) to visit their deathbeds in order to massage them with therapeutic oils while wearing only the flags of their respective homelands—miniature flags, the sort you wave at parades. The reasonable would not abruptly end a blog entry because of a coughing fit.

It is beginning to feel a little Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House around here, what with the slapstick-worthy (if mundane) succession of things gone awry, most recently a new unathletic injury to add to my history of Shopper’s Elbow and Biographer’s Lung—Writer’s Wrist? Typist’s Tendon? I haven’t settled on a name yet, but what it boils down to is tingling fingers, a swollen forearm, and a stiffened, painful burning sensation, the result of wedding myself to my laptop until my muscles shortened and entrapped my nerves. Or something.
At first I was certain it was a blood clot—or maybe, given the arm-tingling, a heart attack. Scott cleverly pointed out that it was the wrong arm for a heart attack, and at last I put two and two together and got “Pernicious InterneT Addiction” (or “Pain In The Ass”), which answer I ignored until my arm hurt too badly to use at all and I was forced to slink off to have my wrist bones popped and clicked back into alignment and an odd muscle in what I can only describe as my wing (somewhere no longer shoulder but not yet breast) stretched and massaged by a professional. This helped a little, but it’s still painful to be on the computer for more than a few minutes at time. I’m going to try using a laptop desk to make up for my not-particularly-ergonomic couch-working posture and I also ordered a devastatingly stylish fingerless glovebrace. This glovebrace gets excellent reviews from video gamers making it de rigueur in parents’ basements around the world, so I’ll be in excellent company. However, until it arrives I am reduced to writhing with pain and annoyance whenever I want to write an email or scroll through my feed reader. At this point I’d just as soon cut my arm off and replace it with something sturdier, like a prosthetic made from gleaming titanium.

On Friday, having recently finished a two-week course of antibiotics for the ailment that had dogged my child since the beginning of May (the antibiotics alone should tell you I was desperate—only after a month of lingering snottiness did I cart Simone to the pediatrician to procure them), we went to Iowa, source of the original pestilence, for the weekend.

I know. It looks so STUPID, typed out like that.

On the drive back yesterday, Simone’s nose started running. Sprinting, really. We had to pull off the highway in search of a gas station to buy tissues, so that I could spend the remaining two hours of the trip turning around every three minutes to staunch the flow. By the time we got home she was burning with fever, and a few minutes after she’d fallen asleep for the night she woke again, sat up, and leaned over to puke in my lap. We’d gone to Iowa to visit Scott’s family, and had thought we’d caught my sister-in-law’s (gonad-rendingly adorable—this was the first time I’d seen them) seven-month-old twins between colds, but no. And now I am paying for it, or Simone is. She’s coughing and congested and fevered and miserable and I swear to god, I cannot take another month like May, it will break my spirit.

This was a lot of whining for one post, I know. So here! Let’s have some cheerful pictures!

First, the poster my brother brought me from a recent trip to Seattle:

There is plenty to find amusing, but the reason I love it is that my brother and I are both MOST amused by the same line—or more specifically, the same two words of that line, the two words that, for us, take this poster from kitschy fun to actual hilarity, and thus this souvenir will always remind me of my beloved Max, and the cozy feeling of having such perfectly matched senses of humor.
(The two words, obviously, are “STAGE VERSION.”)

The next photograph requires explanation. Imagine the scene: after a long day of work, you arrive home, put your key in the door and enter to see…
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
…a FERAL BABY, drinking from your kitchen faucet!

How did it get IN here? you wonder—but there is no time for idle speculation: it has turned at the sound of your footsteps to bare its wee teeth at you before scampering fleetly off the counter. Now its wet feet are slapping against the floor as it races about like a trapped moth and oh, hell, not the vase!
At last you manage to shoo it out an open window with a tennis racket, and surveying the damage, remind yourself to buy traps the next time you’re at the store.

[Actually, Scott has been giving Simone baths in the kitchen sink because she is so distracted by the spray of the removable hose-faucet that she forgets that she's too busy with important pen and spatula related business to make time for bathing, and last week she insisted upon a refreshing quaff of tap water before getting out. But the first story was much better, I think.]

Next, proof that Simone is beginning to grow hair:


It’s only fluffy like this during a slender window after it is washed and before she sleeps upon it, but still, I was shocked by how much there is, all of a sudden.
As Simone herself is fond of saying these days, (demonstrated below), “UH-PIIIIIIZE!”

(That’s “surprise,” for you laypeople.)

Here I am, averting my eyes so that you will not see the CRAZY! in them:

It helped that it was a beautiful, if blisteringly hot, day, and that I had a view of the Chrysler Building from my hotel room window. So much prettier than the Empire State Building. Height isn’t everything, you know.

It also helped that in the cab on the way to the convention center my phone buzzed, and I got the following photograph via text from my mother-in-law:

This baby has only a bucket to shield her from the elements. A naked baby doll and piece of discarded Tupperware are her sole companions. For only three cents a day, you could at least buy her a bigger bucket. Won’t you please help?

Javits Center is huge. HUGE. This shouldn’t have been a surprise, but when I entered to find myself in what appeared to be a multi-level warehouse the size of two train stations, with banks of escalators before me carrying bookbag-laden people from floor to floor, I was rendered motionless, and tried to look nonchalant while I waited for my publicist to fetch me. My publicist, Nicole, is a tiny and formidably accomplished seventeen-year-old. Oh, ok, she is older than that—eighteen, maybe. I kid, but she doesn’t seem old enough to account for her job experience and easy, confident competence. I’m a little intimidated by her, honestly. She is one of those put-together people who instantly make me feel I am about to trip over something or possibly accidentally set my handbag on fire.

I was fetched, and given my badge.

You will notice it says “AUTHOR.” (Do you think real author-authors get to a point where they can see themselves referred to as “AUTHOR” without an internal giggle of disbelief? I doubt it.)
I also took a copy of the special “Show Daily” edition of Publisher’s Weekly, a giant glossy thing that looks like this:

…and which I opened to find a full page ad taken out by Perseus (my publisher, or rather Ur-publisher) to promote their author events. Like mine.

See me? Above EMPIRE OF ILLUSION and next to ALEX AND THE IRONIC GENTLEMAN? Also, please note that the sort of border at the top of the page made up of tiny little book covers has mine in it. This was all very exciting.

Even more exciting was what I saw when the escalator spit us out upstairs onto the convention floor and into the gigantic Perseus area in the center: a long wall of light-up marquee sort of things, like they have for movies.

Holy SHIT, you guys:

From about this point on, I was just a floating, disbelieving, grinning presence. I bobbed on over to the booth, sat at a table, and began signing my name to things. I did this for a couple of hours, and it was wonderful. Some notes:

• They gave me a Sharpie to sign with, which is apparently Standard Signing Equipment, but made me feel a little rude, as if I were defacing the books with graffiti—tagging them, if you will. It felt scandalous to write in someone else’s copy like that. (Of course, I am also the person who gasped and then fiercely scolded a friend when I entered a room to see her book splayed gruesomely on its SPINE.) (I could hear its feeble screams!)
• I signed willy-nilly, on whichever of the first non-text-y pages I happened to open up to, until one woman made me do hers over and informed me that the PROPER place to sign is the title page, NOT the half-title. Remember this, all of you.
• I never did think of anything clever to write. I mostly stuck with “For X” and my name, and added my profuse thanks verbally. (Indeed, I felt misty with gratitude the whole time.)
• Apparently, not every author asks how a name is spelled before signing, which surprised me to hear. I got a lot of “Oh! Thank you for asking!” and a wide variety of spellings. I asked because how annoying would it be, if you are a Cathy, to have a book signed to Kathy instead? My inscriptions may not be clever, but at least they are correct. Maybe that will be my thing?
• If I saw that the person I was signing for was a librarian, I sometimes wrote “Thank you for being a librarian!” before my name. I think I may have frightened a few librarians with my enthusiasm for their profession. (“Oh!” I kept crying gleefully, “You’re a LIBRARIAN!”) In case they are reading now, allow me to explain: When I was in elementary school, I had a particularly wonderful librarian, Mrs. Freuhling, who encouraged my writing—and advocated leniency during the meeting with the principal after I was discovered to be sneaking books home without checking them out. (There was a rule in place that you could check out only as many books per week as the grade you were in, which was not enough to keep me supplied with reading material. I was sneaking the books back INTO the library when I’d finished, but it was slow going, and after I was caught everyone was shocked by the quantity I’d accumulated.) Most importantly, Mrs. Freuhling convinced the staff of the daycare center in which I was confined after school to let me stay down the hall with her, shelving books and learning about the Dewey Decimal System. I spent many happy afternoons filing cards in the catalogues, pushing carts amongst the shelves, and stamping things carefully with the date, and I will always have a bit of cardiac real estate reserved for librarians. My dream job, before the Internet came along and ruined it, was to man the kind of reference desk where a person could wander in (or phone) with some obscure question about, say, renaissance undergarments, and I would find the answer for them. (And while I love computers, I will never forgive them for taking away my precious, precious card catalogues.)
• I felt bad for the pregnant women who picked up a copy of my book, or the people who had me sign theirs to someone they knew who was expecting. (“Maybe for AFTER the baby’s born,” I suggested.)
• Often someone would come up to me and launch into a sales pitch or question, not realizing (despite the stack of books and poised Official Signing Sharpie) that I was only an author and thus of no use to them.
• Sometimes someone would stop, pick up the book, read the back, (“It’s free!” I’d say helpfully) and then put it down and walk away.
• A shocking number of delivery men came by with menus from their restaurants (mostly Chinese, a few Thai). I take it they were making the rounds. How did they get in, I wonder?
• I began the day explaining to everyone who took a copy how ROUGH the ARC was, and how much BETTER the final version is, and how MANY EDITS AND FIXINGS I have made since the galleys were printed, but stopped when it became clear that this was frowned upon by my petite publicity powerhouse, who was also much better than I at summing up the book in a few sentences without stammering or saying disturbing things like “It’s about my daughter’s premature birth and time in the hospital—but it’s funny!” and since she was right THERE I mostly let her field the questions. It is clear that I need to work on being able to discuss my book myself. It shouldn’t be so hard. I did write the damn thing, after all.
• I felt so unfettered and celebratory, more so than I had since turning in the manuscript. I met the most delightful people, too—the sales reps were lovely! And the publisher is this very tall, kind man who said the nicest things about my book. I was struck, again, by how uncommonly lucky I have been. In the cab back to the hotel I kept marveling that any of it was real.

Me, Nicole (my aforementioned publicist), and my editor Jen. Photo blatantly stolen from Running Press’ Facebook page

Anyhow, I am now free to move on. To New York! The Big Apple! The City that Never Sleeps, Probably Because It’s Up Late Worrying About Money!
Did you know that when you take a cab from the Newark airport to Manhattan they put a ONE HUNDRED FIFTY DOLLAR hold on your credit card? Or that the flat rate plus tip and miscellaneous charges can total $90? I didn’t! Lady Liberty’s torch burns something awful when it *@#%s you up the ass!
What I did know but had forgotten is that New York cabbies drive as if being chased by death himself—and, paradoxically, as if they are immortal. Against all odds, I made it to my hotel on Tuesday both alive and financially solvent, and was confronted by a lobby teeming with introverts acting like extroverts. BEA is a yearly reunion for the publishing industry, and the atmosphere was very Nerds Gone Wild (I was awakened at 3am the next morning by high-pitched “WOOOOOO!”-ing outside my door, possibly from librarians). I actually found it all quite charming, this Spring-Break-with-reading, but I didn’t know anyone, and was far too intimidated to join the fun. Instead I hid in my room for a while before deciding to slip downstairs to the hotel nail salon for a mani/pedi, so that my fingers would look presentable when signing books the next morning.

I am not a mani/pedi-getter. The first one I had was for my wedding, and I’ve gone a few times since then, but not many. They are excruciatingly expensive, at least where I’ve had them in the Twin Cities, invariably at Aveda salons staffed with graduates of the Aveda cosmetology school that has a near monopoly here. The nail salon in the hotel, on the other hand, was shockingly cheap, and a few minutes in, it became clear that what I’ve been paying extra for here at home is a vigorous massaging of my guilt. Having someone kneel by your feet for half an hour ministering to your toenails is much less uncomfortable when that person is a middle-class white girl with aggressively hipsterish hair than when the kneeler speaks very little English and is the same age as your mother. I felt guilty the WHOLE TIME—mortified, even—when I wasn’t feverishly wondering what they were saying in their native tongue that made them laugh that way, or failing entirely to understand what they were saying IN ENGLISH, TO ME, resulting in a horribly protracted round of “I’m sorry?” “I’m sorry?” and vibrant blushing. Eventually it was done (and very prettily, I might add) and I overtipped lavishly and scuttled back upstairs to my room, where I ordered and consumed a $20 hamburger and fell into a restless sleep.
Which is what I should be doing right now, damn it all (where does the time GO?), though hopefully without the restlessness, so you will have to wait until tomorrow to hear about the book signing, my not being a hooker, the mysterious case of the umbrella men, and my love for a whole new borough…

My first day back was marvelous in its own right, however. I took Simone to the park for the first time this season.



The swing continues to be the runaway favorite, though she braved the (smallest) slide as well. Seeing that faltering split second of “am I scared or exhilarated?” cross her face brought me swiftly and immediately back to my own early slide experiences. There was a slide at the playground of the Northeast Child Development Center, a slide I remember as being about 18 or 19 (hundred?) feet tall, gleaming silver, like a broiling, gigantic straight razor. It took me AGES to work up the courage to go down that slide, and after I did I couldn’t remember what I’d been so afraid of—I went back again and again and again. Which is sort of how I feel about a lot, lately. I keep doing things that terrify me—and to my shock and delight, I keep coming out at the bottom, whole and grinning.

When I was a couple of years older than Simone is now I spent a week visiting my aunt in Mobridge(?) South Dakota, where after months of eyeing them suspiciously from afar, I tackled my fear of the Tornado Slide. You know the ones I mean: slides that corkscrew, often partially enclosed. Oh, how I feared the Tornado Slide! This was after I had mastered the regular, straight-edged version: the Tornado Slide was my white whale. I recall sitting at the top, slipping a little, clutching at the sides with my grimy hands and thinking “Alexa, you FOOL, what have you gotten yourself into?” And then off I went, like some kind of daredevil. There used to be a picture somewhere that was taken that week, of me poised in the tunnel of the slide’s entrance, my face shadowed but eyes bright as beads with the thrill of my own bravery.
Tire swings and those whirling-deathtrap-child-turntables were another story, of course, but that’s only common sense.

Simone was similarly visiting relatives last week, and though she apparently had a lovely time, I heard there was an Incident that began when she was with her grandmother at some sort of Iowan Mall Play Area, eyeing a little boy. Simone’s fascination with other children is intense—probably because she’s scarcely seen any, due to being largely quarantined for the first two years of her life. At the park yesterday, a little girl started swinging next to us, and Simone didn’t take her eyes off her the entire time.
Anyhow, there she is, my daughter, standing on the edge of the Iowan Mall Play Area, watching a boy-child gambol and play with things. Watching, and watching, and finally venturing over to join him. I picture her like a tentative fawn at this point: hopeful, innocent, eager, a little shy. And then do you know what happened?
That little cocksucking hooligan turned to my fawn-daughter and PUSHED HER DOWN. After that, Simone wanted nothing more to do with the Iowan Mall Play Area.

I presume it is only natural that hearing this story made me stop right where I was on the stairs and bend over holding my chest, my poor heart tearing in a way that was physically painful. I presume it is only natural that I cannot think of that moment without feeling a horrible howling draining of my blood at the knowledge that Simone has had her first encounter with Mean, with Rejection. It’s natural, certainly, to hate that I wasn’t there.
I also presume it is only to be expected that after the initial heart-rending had passed, my greatest desire in the world was to drive to Iowa, to this Iowan Mall Play Area, and put that (innocent, I realize, entirely inculpable!) little brat forcefully through a wall. Totally within the realm of normal maternal emotion, right?

Sometimes I have trouble remembering how this used to work. What is this space? What is it for?

I hesitate to bring up the increasing focus on “monetizing” in the online world, because posts decrying it have become almost as ubiquitous as posts celebrating and dissecting it, and the whole “too punk rock for fiscal concern” stance strikes me as rather adolescent. I have ads, and I don’t see anything the matter with that. At some point it seemed actively wasteful not to have them, considering the slender silhouette of my bank balance these days. But if I am honest, I’ll admit that I find it a little bewildering, the “monetizing” (NOT A WORD!) and the business-y business blogging has become. I love that so many people are newly able to make money doing what they love. I understand the concept of personal branding, and if the term makes my skin crawl a little, well, I am well aware that it is something people have been doing for a long, long time, almost forever, even. Maybe less purposefully and necessarily less effectively, in smaller ways or with narrower influence, but there’s nothing new under the sun, is there? I do think that the heightened self-consciousness this brings can be complicated. I’m not trying to be an Internet Luddite, I just feel a bit of vertigo once in a while. I miss…something.

Like I said, sometimes I wonder what I am doing, here. I seldom write posts that are self-contained, that stand on their own as stories or essays, that have structure and purpose. This isn’t even much of an online diary anymore, given how poorly tended and public it has become. I’m not inspired to optimize or leverage or explore the leveraging of optimization.

I’m not going anywhere—this isn’t a Quitting Blogging Post. I’ll be back tomorrow, whining about packing or some such. This is just a Musing About Things Post. A What Next? Post. A Time For A Snack! Post.

Speaking of which, it is late. Scott and I have had a lovely weekend, just us two. This morning, I am told that Simone finally noticed we were gone. At least, she asked after her father. “Daddy?” she said, signing in a puzzled, expectant way. No mention of Mama, the little rat.