Mushy

Many of you are used to hearing me talking about mushy things. But this time there’s a catch. We’re not talking emotion here, we’re talking food. Mushy food. Food I will be able to swallow after surgery next week.

I am a slightly… restless… sleeper. Words others have used include “scary,” “dangerous,” and “horrific.” (You know who you are.) I make horrible noises, I stop breathing, I kick, I can completely clear a bed of blankets in my sleep. It’s not pretty. Polly once told me on vacation that she thought there was a truck idling outside our hotel room, only to realize no, that was me. She also claims that I flip over completely in my sleep, but that was the same vacation where she got drunk enough to vomit for 14 hours, so her memory should be considered suspect.

I finally went for a sleep study, and was diagnosed with sleep apnea. So I did what any sensible person would do in that situation—I put the test results away for about a year and didn’t think about them. But a couple of months ago I finally saw a specialist, and this is it. I’m doing it. I’m getting my uvula cut down on Monday. No, it’s nothing dirty. It’s the thingie (thingie being the proper medical term) that hangs down the back of your throat.

I had friends offer to come with me to the surgery, but they were trumped by an offer I couldn’t refuse. My parents are coming. Of course, I’m just letting them come for their sake. It’ll make my mom feel better to be here. It has nothing to do with the fact that I’m a complete mommy’s girl. Or that every time I’ve been under anesthesia I’ve woken up crying for her (the most recent time I was 22). Or that she’s the most comforting thing in my world. No, I’m just letting them come for their sake.

So next week I’ll be eating mushy foods and sucking on popsicles. This week I’m trying to clear my desk, make lists, and in general prepare my life to go on without me while I’m recovering. Oh, and make sure my house is completely spotless for my mother's visit. Some things never change....

Happy Days Are Here Again

So after months and months, I finally figured out how to recover access to this blog. Which should make it easier for everyone. Unless I screw it up again. Sigh...

New York winters are long and hard. Now, I know there are many places where winter is longer and harder. But most of those places are not pedestrian cities. Plus, I don’t live there. So I win.

It’s 78 degrees outside, I got my first pedicure of spring yesterday, and I’m wearing a pair of sandals that I dug out from under my desk. They’d been there since last summer. I got a salad for lunch, and I was going to eat it outside, but they haven’t put the summer benches out on Rockefeller Plaza yet. And a few of you have reminded me, rather vehemently I might add, that I’ve been remiss in my blogging, so I decided to take the time to do that.

This good mood and general bonhomie has been particularly hard-earned for me this spring. I’ve been sick. I mean really, really sick. Sicker than I’ve ever been. I know as an adult I’m not supposed to still be blaming things on my mom. But this one really is her fault. See, I went home for Easter. My dad hates strong smells, so my mom has taken everything smelly in the house—scent diffusers, a particularly horrific eucalyptus wreath—and stuffed them into my bedroom. I understand her rationale. That way she gets to keep it, but it doesn’t bother him. Everybody wins. Right? Wrong.

I slept one night there, and broke out in this full-blown asthma and allergies extravaganza that turned into a cold that took two weeks of doing nothing but going to work, antibiotics, cough medicine with codeine, 2 inhalers, and finally a heavy-duty dose of steroids to clear up. Now, I come from a family of the bronchially challenged. There’s always someone sucking on an inhaler, and when my nephews were little, every trip to the beach involved trekking up to first aid to plug in their nebulizers. But it’s still shocking when it happens to you.

After two weeks of this, this past weekend was the first time I actually felt like a human being. So I decided, as is my style, to ease back into a social life gradually—by drinking for about 12 hours on Saturday. Now, it wasn’t exactly my fault. See, I had a bridal shower that segued into a bachelorette party. And there was champagne punch at the shower. How much do I love champagne punch? And then there were wine tastings. And wine tastings. And wine tastings. And really I was just drinking to be polite. And then there was the wine in the limo. And a few pitchers of margaritas back at the house. And then I think some read wine when everything else ran out. But really—I was just being social. Isn’t that the rule? You have to keep drinking so the bride has company? I think that’s definitely the rule.

So here I am, warm again, social again, and back in the swing of things. Happy days are here again.

When It Rains It Pours

They say that into every life a little rain must fall. Those of you on the east coast who have been traveling around in these torrential rains know exactly what that means. It's been kind of nice, actually. Growing up, we spent our summers camping, and the sound of rain on the camper was always one of my favorite noises. When it pours like that, I can listen to the rain on my air conditioner, and it makes almost the same sound.
My life seems to be attracting all sorts of metaphorical rain too, though, these days. My aunt Jeanne passed away last week. It's hard to really mourn someone who lived to be 98, though. She clearly had a full life. She was my grandmother's sister, and their family came to the States from Quebec when they were children. I interviewed 2 of their other sisters for a college course I took on the Depression, and they told me stories about how they all lived together (there were nine of them) and whoever managed to get a job would pitch their earnings into a communal pot. The girls had only one pair of hose and one nice dress, so they would take turns going to mass. One would go to an early mass, come home and change clothes, and the next would put the dress on and so on.
Jeanne was my cousin Missy's grandmother, and when my grandmother died when I was 8, Missy offered to share hers with me. We stole her money for the paperboy once, for or our "secret club." The club was a treehouse we built, and the money went for one thing and one thing only--candy from the corner store. (Missy, of course, confessed, and we got in trouble.) Jeanne used words lke "bad lucky" (the opposite of lucky), and one year after she was already starting to go senile, she showed up on Christmas in a pair of bright purple polyester pants and a fuschia sweater. And every time she'd see you, whether or not she remembered who you were, she'd give you a big hug and say, "it's so nice to see you," as though you had just made her year. She was the last alive of her siblings, or friends, and outlived her husband by 20 years. She used to say, "It's not funny, you know, to be the last one left." And now she's back with them all. I hope she told them all how happy she was to see them.

That Makes Me Happy

In high school, my friend Liam used to always say, whenever he liked something, "that makes me happy." Very simple. Just a declaration of happiness. And I always loved that best about him, because I feel like people just don't do that, don't just decide, in the moment, to be happy. Somewhere in a box I still have a greeting card from my friend Amy, wishing me "a lifetime of Liam-like happiness." So, like all good ideas, I stole it. And I've spent my life trying to take those moments to just be glad, and to regularly declare, "that makes me happy."

For the past couple of weeks, I've been in a funk. Remember that Flintstones episode, where there's the guy with the rain storm that just follows him around all the time? Yeah, I've been that girl lately. I've felt bad about my job, my body, my life…But no more. I've had enough of that crap. I watched The Secret this weekend, and just made a decision to be happy. And once you set your mind to being in a good mood, you are. Funny how that works…

Actual exchange with my sister Mich yesterday:
Me: Yay!
Mich: Yay what?
Me: Nothing. I've just committed myself to being happy and grateful.
Her: You are a horse of a different color… and I mean that in only the nicest way.
Me: What color? Can I be pink? If I'm going to be another color, I'd want to be pick
Her: Sure. It would definitely be something cheerful and bright.

For those of you who haven't read The Secret, the premise is that the universe is governed by the Law of Attraction. If you send positive thoughts and feelings into the universe, that's what will come back to you. As much as I hate New Age anything, this one really makes sense. Plus, it appeals to my innate Pollyanna-ness. Has anyone else heard about this?

Girl Armor

Bookgirl note: Yes, this is the same ol' blog. It's just got one new home.

I'd like to begin this post by saying EVERYTHING'S FINE, and IT WAS NOTHING. But I had to go for an ultrasound today because my doctor found a lump in my breast last week. The first thing I did was call my sister Celeste, because she's the most level-headed person I know, and tell her, "This is me not freaking out. So I need you to not freak out with me." The next call, before I even made it back to my office, was to my friend Polly, because that's what I do in these situations. I call one of my family members, and then I call Polly. And she told me that I shouldn't overreact, but if I did want to overreact, then I had every right to. Because if you couldn't overreact over something like that, what could you overreact over? And that was it. Panic over. Because hey, now I had an "Overreact if you want to" card in my pocket. And once you have one of those, you don't need to overreact. Half of the reason you overreact is because you're trying so hard not to. Once you don't have to try not to, then hey! you're halfway there. (If that paragraph made sense to you, then congratulations! You can follow girl logic.)

So today was the appointment, and I wore tights and and a pink skirt and heels, and on the subway down to the office, I put on some lipstick. Because if I was going to potentially have breast cancer, I damn well was going to look cute when I got tested. Now, I'm lazy about nail polish, blowdry my hair literally once a year, and never wear makeup to work. But if I'm facing a situation that intimidates me, you better believe I'm going to be done to the hilt. Girl armor. There's just something about knowing you look your best that makes you square your shoulders and face problems a little stronger. I was dating someone years ago, and he came over late at night when I was already ready for bed. We were fighting, and he was launching into"do we just walk away now?", and all I could say was, "We cannot have this conversation when I'm not wearing make-up." He looked at me like I had lost my mind, but another woman would have understood perfectly.

A handful of my girlfriends met me out for dinner last night. Two of them planned it, and they called it a girls' night, and we never once mentioned the test, but I knew exactly why they suggested the dinner. And it made me love them even more. After all, aren't our friends the very best form of girl armor there is?

This One's for Polly

My friend Polly e-mailed me the other day to tell me that I don’t update my blog often enough to keep her entertained. Normally, that would have been fine. But this email came on a day when I was so overwhelmed, so completely in over my head, that I couldn’t see straight. So instead of being flattered that she likes my blog, and yes, I have readers, I just barely resisted the urge to respond with something that would have made my mama ashamed of me, and then I ignored the phone when she called. So even though she doesn’t know all this (at least not until she reads this entry), I knew that I was fresh and felt bad about it. So I’m writing a special entry, just to entertain her. This one’s for Polly.

One of the things that makes working in publishing so much fun is that there will always be a giant gap between what needs to be done and what one human being can conceivably do. For perfectionists, in that gap lies madness. Carolyn Reidy, the head of the adult group at my company and my boss’s boss, once put it best: “Every person in this building has a stack of things on their desk they could do to sell more books that they will never get to. It’s all about triage.” Some days, I remember that quote and I’m fine. Others, the knowledge that I’m doing my best and it will never be enough gets more than a little discouraging. Last week was the latter. I grabbed the first piece of paper I could find and was using it as a bookmark last week, and then I noticed that it was my Prozac prescription refill. The universe has a sense of humor….

My book club met yesterday, and I had to brave public transportation to get there for the first time. My book club meets on Long Island at Hofstra, my alma mater, which is a beautiful campus. Set smack dab in the middle of a giant slum. I had forgotten just how much fun the Hempstead train station was, with the assortment of homeless, quasi-homeless, and strung out people. One man was talking to himself and crying, then he went outside and made out with his girlfriend for a while. She was wearing mint green fuzzy slippers. Good times.


We read a little bit of everything in the club. This month’s book was A Tree Grows In Brooklyn by Betty Smith. And it was brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. I had read the first half before, but never finished it, because trying to set time aside to read something that long is hard to do when my work reading is piling up. But I always give myself permission to take a break from manuscripts for my book club, which is one of the reasons I love being in it so much. It was one of those books where I got to the end and just kind of held it for a minute to savor the moment. It was a book that reminded me why I love reading as much as I do. One of the women in the group is older, and read it in 1943 when it was new, as a 13-year-old. She’s never reread it, because she always wants to remember it from that space, not with her adult perspective. I have books like that from my past, that made such an impact that I can remember so vividly where and when I read them. Does anyone else?

I believe in people... well, sometimes

I realize I haven't written in ages. If you didn't notice, or even worse, noticed and didn't miss me, please don't tell me. It'll just make me sad….

It seems to be a season for engagements. Two of my friends and a cousin all got engaged over the holidays (although not, of course, to one another). The Hallmark people love me.
I'm being torn by my own Pollyanna-ness. Reality vs always wanting to believe the best of people. See, here's the deal. I won't name names, to protect the guilty, but a few months ago I was home from a night out too early to go to sleep, but too tipsy to be productive. So I decided wouldn't it be fun to go on Yahoo Personals? Who knew who I'd find???
Yeah, that's where the problem comes in. Because this guy, let's call him Guy, had an ad on there. The ad said Guy was single, and lived with roommates. "Hmm, roommates?," I asked myself. "Is that what we're calling the long-term girlfriend and her kids he lives with?" Because I know them.
And it wasn't an outdated, years-old ad. No, Yahoo handily tells the reader how long it's been since the ad owner logged on. In Guy's case, it had been days. So I stewed and hemmed and hawed, and finally decided not to tell the girlfriend. For the sake of this blog, we'll call her Girlfriend. But I saw the couple recently, and Girlfriend was wearing a shiny new engagement ring. I waited until we were alone and I said to Guy, "Guy, I'm not sure if you know this, but you have an active Personal ad on Yahoo Personals."
Guy, naturally, expresses shock. "No", he says. "I had no idea."
Me: "I figured you musn't know, that's why I wanted to tell you."
Guy: "I have to take care of that."
Me, pointedly: "Yes, you do."
Exit me, stage left.
Now back to the Pollyanna-ness. I want to believe it was an innocent mistake. Maybe it was an old ad that he visits every son often to see the matches. Because who doesn't like a good ego boost now and then?? And I love a happy ending. But there's this little voice telling me that something's fishy… I want to believe the best in people. But sometimes people make it hard.