…and then it was springtime.

Meet Cute: I’m writing a romcom. If you want something done, etc etc. It’s about washed up pop stars and working on it has necessitated listening to a lot of 98 Degrees, I am not going to lie to you. Yesterday I spent half an hour researching the Spears/Timberlake dance off of August 2002.  I feel a little like my brain is leaking out of my ears. I also feel very, very happy. I have 53 pages so far.

As a result: My apartment, unsurprisingly, is a disaster.

Small World: A lawyer called my job today, and when I asked her name I realized she was the ARD on the west side of campus when I was an RA one hundred years ago. Remember, that girl who was in law school who everybody thought was so pretty? Sure you do. Did she make out with somebody? I am thinking of one somebody in particular, but I might be making that up in my addled brain. Wouldn’t be the first time I have fabricated a makeout.

Bridge, Falling: We leave for London in 13 days.

Current Obsessions: The Ephron canon, Nora and Delia both; Tender is the Night; those chocolate easter eggs with the chalky candy shell; stacked grey pumps from Land’s End Canvas; The Killing; fabricated, clandestine makeouts between Kate Middleton and Prince Harry; the newly expanded beer offerings at the Hub; carnivals; herbs planted in teacups; Paul Pierce.

Leather Jacket: Has anybody seen the Boston episode of No Reservations? I hear Weirdly Sexy Tony Bourdain spends most of it at, like, the Shannon Tavern.

Worth Noting: I really sort of miss writing in this thing.

here are some things that really just annoy the crap out of me:

people who wear khaki pants with athletic sneakers

the song “daughters”

when people say “we need to do such and such a thing” when really what they mean is “you need to do such and such a thing”

smug marrieds

how it always smells like weed on the first floor of my building because our downstairs neighbors bake their apartment like it’s a dorm at UC Berkeley in 1968

people who take up more than their fair share of space on public transportation

papercuts that bleed and make you feel individually singled out and persecuted

that’s it! i mean, that is a lie, there are a LOT of other things that really annoy me, but i want to know what yours are instead. so tell.

Meg made me take a Myers-Briggs this morning, which was not only sort of fun but also more difficult to cheat on than, say, a Cosmo sex quiz. I came up as an INFJ, with a:

• slightly expressed introverted personality
• distinctively expressed intuitive personality
• distinctively expressed feeling personality
• very expressed judging personality

VERY EXPRESSED JUDGING PERSONALITY, PEOPLE. I’m actually sort of startled by how accurate that thing was.  Go take it and let me know what you are!

7. Successfully eat a lobster

Done and done. Last night we went to Atlantic Fish so I could officially conquer my fear of viewing my dinner strolling around in a tank before I consumed it. Why I was so anxious about eating something you crack open with hilarious little instruments and dunk in a cup of butter remains unclear, but I am happy to report that cocktails helped with my nerves and the whole endeavor was rawther exciting and delicious.

(I did not eat the head. I don’t think you should ever eat anyone’s head. And really, if you don’t have your principles, what do you have in this world?)

Meanwhile, we are gaining on my 26th birthday. I have some ish to do.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L03AuXD3EYs&feature=player_embedded#at=51]

You’re welcome.

When Tom goes away I turn feral, pile dirty dishes in the sink until the kitchen looks like the site of an archaeological excavation and leave a bread-crumb trail of discarded work clothes in the hall. I watch a lot of Greek. I plop two runny eggs over some Knorr rice sides (butter and herb flavor!), call it dinner, and eat it in five minutes while looking at Tumblr.

I don’t love what this says about me, but it’s true.

I make plans. I go to the movies. I come home to New York and try three different restaurants (Mexican, Italian, French) with three different members of my family, and while this probably doesn’t help with my sodium intake it certainly helps with my mood. I nap. I watch Life as We Know It with my sister’s roommate, pass judgement on Katie Heigl, and eat a fancy cupcake decorated to look like a Hostess. On the bus I work on a project I thought was long-dead but which, I have recently discovered, is not. Said project makes it necessary to listen to a lot of Maroon 5 and I accidentally waste several hours contemplating the ratio of skeevy grossness to sex appeal that is Adam Levine. Survey says: two to one.

I listen to tunes in the morning. I snuggle our temporary cat.  I wake up in the dark in the center of the mattress, like an island in the middle of the sea.

i like that it is almost the gee dee end of february

i like that it is rain and not snow outside

i like all the boston girls on the bus in their hunters like a big rubber rainbow

i like the michael buble version of wonderful tonight where he sings the second verse in portugese or something

i like watching romcoms on netflix watch instantly

i like that sierra is coming tonight and we are going to go to the american wing of the mfa and drink margaritas

i like that february has been filled with awesome ladies

i like that my new bed is getting delivered on march 12

i like that tom turned 26 this week and we all went out and celebrated with fancy pizzas and beer as well as some ill-advised beef jerky

i like staying in and drinking two buck chuck

i like that the oscars are on sunday and i am throwing a little fete

i like a hot pink pedicure

i like the book club girls

i like wearing my hair in a braid over my shoulder like the Mormon ladies on Big Love only without the pouf in front

i like that i spent this month putting together a short story collection and i have written more than i thought

i like that marissa is going to singapore on monday and quite literally following her bliss

i like that she is leaving her cat with me

i like that rebecca and i are working on something truly badass and i am going to talk all about it next week

i like that i threw away like eight pairs of truly disgraceful shoes last night

i like that it’s friday

i like you

At Ten Tables I order a brown butter walnut cake with some goat’s milk ice cream that tastes, for all the world, like blood. My eyes fly open as it hits me, the sharp iron tang: that feeling I’m ingesting something wrong and perverse, Edward Cullen out for Valentine’s Day dinner. I clap one panicky hand over my mouth.

“What?” Tom asks, eyeing me with suspicion. Already tonight he has gamely eaten beef cheeks, turnip soup, and two types of uncooked salmon. I worry that vampire ice cream might push him right over the culinary edge.

“Well…” I swallow with some effort and open my mouth to tell him, but before I can get the words out I come down with an impossible case of the giggles, noisy and inappropriate in this temple of serious eating, all wine pairings and foie gras and pomegranate reductions. The laughs bubble up inside of me, unstoppable: red and liquid, full of life.

somebody who will be your Valentine for the eighth year running even though you are a snotty, aching mess hopped up on DayQuil who just wants to watch Fringe and groove to the dulcet musical stylings of Michael Bolton Pandora. When a man loves a woman, indeed.

(Love you. Yeah, you.)

At Emerson I had a thesis advisor who didn’t give two craps about me, and every time we met I would remind him about my project and he would ask me if I had ever read anything by Alice Munro.

“No,” I’d say.  “Not since last week.”

“Oh,” he’d say, as if perhaps this was the first time he and I were having this conversation. “Well, I like Alice Munro very much.”

It was too bad for this professor that Alice Munro was not his thesis advisee, and once I lost my temper and told him so, but in the end he circled every single and in the first twenty pages of my novel which was frankly one of the more helpful things anyone ever did for me in college.

This weekend I finally did read some Alice Munro, slouched in a seat on the Lake Shore Limited and crunching away on a bag of pretzel nuggets, and I am sorry but unsurprised to report that I found her smug and unbearably priggish. I imagine her face all pinched and lemony in that way that British people and thesis advisors sometimes look, like maybe you’re going to spill your cocktail on their Review of Books or leave a trail of unnecessary conjunctions on their rugs, like probably in five minutes this story is going to be made into a soporific art house feature for which Dame Judi Dench will be nominated as Best Supporting Actress.

This is, you understand, only one of the many reasons why I am never going to be published in the New Yorker.

It’s not like this is some shocking revelation: as a reader and a writer, I have always been more Hoffman than Munro, and if I’m not mistaken it was a particularly notable Brit who advised to thine own self be true. I think I knew it in the back of my mind even then as I slogged through my thesis, sitting there across from this supposedly brilliant academic letdown with my 200 pages of  YA romance and thinking: you and me and Alice, buddy. We are certainly not writing for each other.