• “I think you should put some more sex at the beginning.” -My mother, on the revision of the Giant Mofo Writing Project
• Headline in this Herald this morning: FREEBIES FOR ILLEGALS. Always classy, Boston Herald. Always classy.
• What I am wearing has a direct impact on how I feel about my day.  I don’t know how it took me 25 years to figure that out. Anyway, today I feel pretty good, thanks.
• Have you heard that thing about Bill Murray? That he’s going around New York sneaking up behind people and putting his hands over their eyes and saying “Guess who?” And then when they turn around it’s BILL EFFING MURRAY and he says, “No one will ever believe you”? Dear God, please let that be true.
• I think if someone handsome followed me around and scratched my back forever I would never be sad again.
• We’re seeing Inception tonight! I am eager to have my mind blown.

The Twenty-Five Greatest Things About This Summer So Far, in No Particular Order:

1. The Giant Mofo Writing Project that has eaten my whole life and makes me spacey and weird and not-bloggy

2. My dad trying to sort out the plot of Eclipse based on the information he’d gleaned from a conversation between my mother and me: “So…they’re a family of vampires? And they drive Volvos. But the girl isn’t a vampire, so she drives a truck.”

3. The chicken Meg roasted at this month’s book club with milk, lemon, sage and cinnamon (the company wasn’t terrible either)

4. Watching the planes land at Castle Island at sunset, one after the other after the other

5. Everything about this video: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfzRlcnq_c0]

6. The short ribs at Toro

7. Fab visits from JPal, Sierra, and Marissa including delicious dinners, drinks on the deck, and serious talks about religion and bounty hunters

8. The new Hanson CD

9. A goat cheese tasting at Formaggio

10. My new costume ring from American Eagle that cost like 12 bucks and sparkles and makes me happy every time I look at it

11. Tom giving me a hug, looking down, and saying, “God, you are so little.”

12. This song (don’t laugh, it’s amazing! Whatever, I know you’re laughing, and I don’t care)

13. A lot of really excellent time with my family: coffee dates and book talk with my mom, drinks with Miss J, coconut cake and Sabrina with my dad

14. White Collar on USA Network. Handsome men! Fedoras! Kelly Kapowski! WHAT IS NOT TO LIKE.

15. Pedicure, iced coffee, US Weekly. (Stars! They’re Just Like Us!)

16. Being on line in Walgreen’s in front of a guy who was buying three boxes of Lemonheads and nothing else

17. The fact that the new Domino’s crust really IS better than the old Domino’s crust! Kudos to you, Creepy President of Domino’s.

18. Limeade and lemon ginger iced tea

19. I might or might not have been promoted yesterday

20. Writing exercises that actually work, or at the very least are a pleasant way to pass a July afternoon

21. Swimming in the pool at Tom’s Aunt T’s like a small blue-suited fish

22. A slow, fabulous reread of Prodigal Summer

23. A suntan and a supportive bra

24. The tomato mozzarella sandwich from the New England Soup Factory

25. The chalkboard sign outside the yoga studio I pass every morning: Slow and Easy.

Aaaand we didn’t even go on vacation yet.

Oh hi there, blogland.

1. It’s almost June so we are in full-on party mode around here. My baby sister comes in on Saturday for a weekend full of summer love, including but certainly not limited to a walk on the beach, a six pack of raspberry UFO, and the 3rd annual kitchendoor Memorial Day rooftop barbecue. Speaking of which: would love your favorite recipes for BBQ-type salads. Will probably do a tomato+feta and an avocado+bean, but am always looking to mix it up a little. We live on the edge, you know. Am wondering abut a potato salad with bacon and dill.

2. Getting home from babysitting to find Tom asleep on the couch like a little kid with his dinner half-eaten on the coffee table in front of him. His response: “I…guess I took a nap.”

3. NPR’s Radio Boston. Also, the fact that the host of NPR’s Radio Boston is named Megna Chakrabarti. Also, the fact that I went to college with a girl named Katalaya Jiraboondilak.

4. Current uniform: skinny jeans + Gap v-neck + spring scarf + flip flops + sunglasses.

5. Daydreaming about cowboys and gas stations and broken-down bungalows with dusty front lawns and bathtubs in the yard. Calling said daydreaming “work”.

What are you guys up to?

1. Get a tattoo

2. Get a driver’s license, finally (groan)

3. Make a souffle

4. Take a corny picture in a phone booth in London

5. Start (and perhaps complete) the Novel That Is In My Brain

6. Become the kind of person who can fold completely in half

7. Successfully eat a lobster

8. Sell the sofa, buy the desk

9. Buy flowers every Friday

10. Write and publish a feature-length article, with interviews and everything like a grownup

11. Spend more time outside

12. Drink more water, read more books, eat more donuts

13. Learn to use the sewing machine to make things besides curtains and pillows

14. Learn to use the camera to take pictures of things besides the tops of buildings

15. Come out of this year with one photo of myself I actually like

16. Do something with the wall in the hallway, even if all that means is scrubbing the scuffs off

17. Get the record player to work

18. Make it to California

19. Be a little gentler with myself

20. Be a little gentler with other people

21. Publish something scandalous under a pen name

22. Learn a new game

23. Remember how much I like going to random concerts

24: Make some huge-ass art for the huge-ass bedroom walls

25: Remember the following: u b u. i’ll b me.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_tBHoRaxns&feature=related]

I repeat-one-ed for an hour today while I walked down the Castle and back. Am not even close to getting sick of it.

Twenty-five today. Out celebrating. Back Monday with Five Good Things: Birthday Edition and a 25 in 25 list that I hope to actually complete. Imagine that.

are the titles, respectively, of those two photos. I had a third one for you, called “bread salad” but I can’t figure out how to make the pictures I take in my house after dark not be awful, so you will just have to use your imaginations. It’s a shame, though, because that bread salad–Ina’s Panzanella, more specifically–was a thing of great and terrible beauty. It basically is a pile of tomatoes and croutons soaked in olive oil, so really there was never any doubt.

This week we are having fancy dinners at my house, a) because I had not cooked anything in many weeks and felt terribly guilty about it and b) we are celebrating, among other things, a new writing gig (number five, bitches), my twenty-fifth birthday, and the series finale of Lost. Actually, it is Eat Your Emotions Week here at Kitchendoor!

Besides the bread salad: blackened chili lime chicken, steak with crumbled bleu cheese, grilled asparagus and corn on the cob, turkey avocado melts, and a cake plate full of chocolate chip cookies.

Look out, world. My emotions weigh ten pounds.

I love romantic comedies. I LOVE THEM. I love them so much that I have been known to try and make things that are not romantic comedies, such as Law and Order: SVU, into romantic comedies. “I’m watching for the love!” I tell Tom cheerily, as the medical examiner wheels broken and mutilated bodies on gurneys across the screen. “The love and the laughs!”

As a connoisseur of the genre, it is a particular bummer and personal affront to me that so many romantic comedies are a steaming pile of crap. Take, for example, He’s Just Not That Into You, which I had the misfortune to watch over the weekend. When I first saw the trailer a year ago, a small hard knot of dread formed in the pit of my stomach and I thought to myself, “In the future, there is going to be some lonely night at home when you are going to succumb to this film. And when you do, it is probably going to make you barf.”

What do you know, I was right.

I hated this movie. I hated everything about it. If it was my boyfriend I would dump it and if it was a guy at a bar I would slip it the number for the Rejection Hotline. I hated it so much the whole time I was watching it I was like, holy CRAP, I need to write a blog post about this RIGHT AWAY.

I hated the fake-looking, too-perfect sets and the no sense of geographic location and the obvious, forgettable soundtrack. I hated that none of the women had careers except maybe they worked at an advertising agency that only advertised cinnamon, or something?  I hated how pathetic and neurotic and awful the chicks were, and how all the men except Ben Affleck were such asses, and even Ben Affleck was kind of an ass, but I’m willing to forgive him because Ben Affleck spends his whole life not being Matt Damon and whatever, I bet that’s hard. But he’s the only one I’m letting slide.

I hated that there was one guy with dark skin in it, and he played the construction worker. I hated the whole “this is my coven of sassy gay friends” thing. I hated Jennifer Aniston walking that dog down the aisle and wanting a husband so desperately, dear Jennifer Aniston: when you make movies about stuff like that it makes me feel uncomfortable about your real life. I hated everything about the way Jennifer Connolly chose to deliver her uptight, stereotypical, lazily-written wife lines. I hated everything about the way Ginnifer Goodwin did everything, which is unfortunate because normally I really like Ginnifer Goodwin. I do not normally like Scarlett Johansson, and whatever I didn’t like her in this either, but that’s no loss. Scarlett Johansson is like that girl at college who read one book by Foucault and now she’s all thinkin’ she’s bad, and also I am almost positive she’s secretly having nasty May-December sex with Woody Allen. I always want to yank her by the hair as hard as I can.

Important questions raised by the viewing of this movie:

1. Why is Bradley Cooper SO COMPLETELY DISGUSTING IN EVERYTHING HE DOES? I don’t mind a little smarminess (I’m looking at you, Clive Owen), but Jesus it’s like this guy is going to infect you with herpes through the television.

2. Why don’t Nora Ephron and Nancy Meyers write all the movies, ever?

3. Why doesn’t the Mac Guy do more things? He was pretty gross in this, too, but I was taken by his eyelashes and the way he delivered his boring, corny, inevitable you make me want to be a better man speech at the finale.

The biggest problem of all: Obviously now I have to watch Valentine’s Day so I can do a compare-and-contrast. MY LIFE IS SO HARD.

An old man on a bench outside the Trader Joe’s said that to me this morning. He also nodded at my sunflowers and said, “Pretty flowers for a pretty girl,” which is the kind of thing that makes me smile if and only if it is coming from an old man on a bench in the morning.

Needs for today:

1. A recommendation for a good multivitamin/calcium supplement/magical voodoo to make all my joints and muscles stop hurting all the time, especially good lower back stretches and something for behind my knees

2. 500 words of fiction, banked

3. A long walk to Castle Island, followed by some Two Buck Chuck

See? I am not difficult to please.

In New York at the Dunkin’ Donuts they put Joe Girardi’s face on the Box of Joe.

Am back. Am here. Am cleaning things up.