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New Orleans, LA, August 2010

The Dive From Clausen’s Pier is actually a pretty good book so far in an “oh hey that just made my commute go by really fast” kind of way, if you can ignore the fact that it was made into a Lifetime movie starring Mona from The Adventures of Pete and Pete. However, I just got to page 159 and have been totally and completely hung up, as if I was a ten-year-old-boy, by the use of the word buttock.

Like, singular.

Actually, the exact phrase she uses is “each hand was full of buttock,” and I’m sorry, but SERIOUSLY WHY DOESN’T LIFETIME WANT TO BUY THE RIGHTS TO MY NOVEL, I WOULD NEVER SAY SOMETHING SO GROSS.

Man, the level of discourse on this blog has really plummeted, huh? Remember when I used to talk about, like, all that baking I did?

I’m going on vacation tomorrow. I’m going to try to think of intelligent, genteel topics for us to explore together upon my return. Don’t fill your hands with anyone’s buttock while I’m gone.

Having seen both of their concerts in the last week (and having enjoyed them immensely, thank you), it is my new fondest wish that John Mayer and Maroon 5’s Adam Levine would co-star in a buddy cop dramedy set in the 1980s, and they’d both wear aviators and huge moustaches, and Levine would be the uptight by-the-book cop who is a big crybaby when things don’t go his way and is always checking himself out in the window of the police cruiser, and Mayer would be the laid-back rapscallion who doesn’t have time for rules when there are LIVES AT STAKE, and maybe he has something dark and humiliating in his past like a failed relationship with America’s Sweetheart Jennifer Aniston, and while they are on stakeouts Mayer always wants to talk about the meaning of life and Levine always wants to talk about his hair, and every episode would end with a musical number like the early episodes of Buffy.

When I pitched this idea to Tom on the walk home last night he said: “Didn’t both of those dudes have sex with Jessica Simpson?”

To which I said: “DUH, love triangle. Haven’t you ever seen any TV before? She would play the Girl Friday.”

We are still auditioning for the role of Gruff-To-Hide-How-Much-He-Cares Police Lieutenant.

Okay. You know how authors have certain themes and tropes and whatnot they go back to over and over again, like John Irving with hookers and Barbara Kingsolver with the environment and John Updike with being a miserable washed-up  basketball player who hates women?

Future literature majors of America, take heed: based on the fiction I’ve written since college, I’m pretty sure my things are “cheating on one’s spouse with his or her sibling” and “feral cats”.

Dear Charlie St. Cloud,

I did not expect you to be good, and you certainly did not disappoint in that regard. In fact, you were embarrassing and ham-handed and rather putrid in parts. Also, Ray Liotta continues to look like a deranged axe murderer  even when he is playing a Kindly Catholic Paramedic; ergo, I suspect he was miscast.

Having said that, Charlie St. Cloud, I must admit that you succeeded verily in scratching all kinds of anti-feminist emotional itches I’d like to pretend I don’t have (I went to a snotty liberal arts college! I use phrases like “ambitious, but problematic”! I’ve read Laura Mulvey!). Frankly, the experience of watching you was like having all the stupidest, most humiliating parts of my id reflected back at me in some kind of horrifying and delightful funhouse mirror. To my chagrin, I especially enjoyed the PG-13 frolicking in the graveyard (complete with artful cutaway shot) and the scene in which Zac Ephron (spoiler alert) revives a hypothermic girl WITH THE SHEER MOLTEN POWER OF HIS HOTNESS.

Apparently the theme of this week’s media consumption is “sex with the vaguely undead,” since yesterday I finished reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, which was shortlisted for the  Booker Prize in 2005 and has recently been made into the kind of dullish art-house fare not even Kiera Knightley will be able to convince Tom to come and see with me. The book (the story of three British kids at a weird, creepy boarding school where Something is Clearly Amiss), while haunting and smartly written, left me feeling cold and annoyed at the end, like as much as I wanted to I could never quite get to caring about any of these people. Furthermore, it did absolutely nothing for my lady bits: ambitious but problematic, indeed.

So, Charlie St. Cloud, before you sail off into the sunset of your happy ending, tell me this: what is a girl to do, if she likes her romance and her handsome men just as much as she likes not feeling like an insipid moron? Is the world at large really incapable of producing a piece of entertainment that can serve both God and mammon? Didn’t we almost have it all?

Best of luck with your future endeavors. I look forward to hearing from you.

August Around Here: In the Heights. John Mayer, Maroon 5. Rhinebeck with M (and the Clintons, natch. Mazel tov, Chelsea and Marc). Dinners on the deck. Never Let Me Go. New Orleans next week. Dresses and flipflops. Thunderstorms and air conditioning. Visits from pals. The Stand. Cocktail party with the book club ladies. Oatmeal-raisin-chocolate chips. New bar on the corner. Movies at the drive-in. Write it, send it out (rinse and repeat). Eat Pray Love and Charlie St. Cloud. Walks to the beach. New business cards. Calls home.

Also: Wyclef runs for president of Haiti! Target makes it absolutely necessary for me to buy my toilet paper elsewhere! (Tom says: “I am interested to see how long that boycott will last.” I say: “OH JUST WATCH ME.”) California cleans up its act just in time for a visit from moi!

In Conclusion: it does not say RSVP on the Statue of Liberty. Thank you.

You are my hero. I have been obsessively unsubscribing to email lists for the last two days, and it’s like the feeling I got when I finally admitted that those shirts I bought at Forever 21 were a bad shape for my boobs and that furthermore, what the hell am I even doing shopping at Forever 21?

By which I mean: LIBERATING.

From The Love Shop via Micaela.

Also, I was sort of kidding about that “shit celebrities do” thing  I said yesterday, but: COME ON, PEOPLE. Amazing. AMAZING.

Of note:

1. We saw Ovo last night! It was about eggs and dancing, jumping, flying, undulating, wackily-dressed bugs.  Basically it was awesome. Basically I wonder what it would be like if I could become an acrobat and wrap my legs around my body and have men dressed as grasshoppers toss me around as if I weighed no more than a dust mote.

2. I think the new theme of this blog is going to be: weird shit done by celebrities. For your enjoyment, Brad Paisley enters the New Yorker cartoon contest. Stars! They’re just like us!

3. The Kids Are All Right: now THIS was a movie that made me feel my feelings. Two very enthusiastic thumbs up, especially if you can arrange to see it in the middle of the afternoon in a scenic rural Massachusetts town in a theater full of delightful old people. Dear Mark Ruffalo, you are simultaneously the worst and the best, never change.

4. On the agenda for today: short ribs, flash fiction, and convincing Tom to crack my achy back.

5. I miss my family. Biological and not.

From the list:

21. Publish something scandalous under a pen name

Done and done. And I will never, under any circumstances, tell you where or what it is.

(I, uh, also hung some pictures up in my hallway!)