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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.

I know what you’re doing, Boston.

I know what you’re doing, you miserable frozen tundra, full of six-foot tall snow mountains defiled by dog pee and car exhaust. I know what you’re doing with your epic commutes that take three extra hours, the minutes ticking by on those enormous digital clocks they installed at the Copley T station instead of, I don’t know, using that money to make train doors that don’t freeze open at the outdoor stops. I know what you’re doing with your  sinister icy patches that exacerbate my clumsy-person PTSD, the knowledge that this winter’s inevitable wipeout is just waiting for me and my tailbone and my poor, long-suffering, perpetually-bruised patellas. I know what’s going on.

You’re trying to break my goddamn spirit, and I’m not going to let you.

We’ve spent seven long, hideous Februarys together, Boston, and while it is true that you are a horrible fucking bastard from January through March you are certainly at your ugliest during this, the cruelest of months. But lately it’s occurred to me that I’m somehow complicit in your reign of snowy terror: to paraphrase Eleanor Roosevelt, no one can make you feel homicidal without your consent, and I’ve spent the greater part of my twenties letting you have your wintery way with me.

Not this time.

I’ve got a plan, Boston. I’ve got twenty-eight days of gray, slushy hell staring me down, and I am going to get through them with a smile on my face if it kills me (which, all things considered, it very well might). I’ve got four rockin’ all-girls weekends lined up. I’ve got an Oscar party to plan. I’ve got a kilo of Emergen-C to consume, a sewing project to start, and the first season of Vampire Diaries on its way from Netflix. I’ve got a story to finish and a tattoo artist to find. I’ve got twenty-eight salads to eat and some frivolous-but-amazing Pottery Barn furniture to purchase. I have hamstrings to stretch in front of new episodes of The Good Wife, and I’ve got celebrities to obsess about over at completely delightful. Do you hear me, Boston? I am not afraid of you, and I will beat your ass.

But first, I’m going to need some more coffee, and possibly a hat.

When we grow up and have money we are going to start Apple Tush Farms, a for-profit agricultural endeavor in upstate New York with chickens and pigs and goats and maybe horses, except that Sierra has a fear of horses, so maybe not horses. Alpacas, though. For sure with the alpacas. At some point we’ll have to learn to loom.

Marissa is going to make the pies and take them to the market. Jennie will grow all the herbs. Personally I would like to supervise the sexy fieldhands (as its name suggests, Apple Tush is a sexy farm), though I suspect that’s a responsibility that will have to be shared.

We’re considering starting a summer stock and giving classes in sock-monkey construction and Contemporary American Cheesemongering. We’re keeping our options open. I think mostly we just want to sit in rocking chairs and shell peas and talk to one another, fireflies flicking, animals settling down in the barn behind the house.

Plus, you know. The fieldhands.

via The Big Harumph. Sent this one out to Jackie last week (because I do).

In New Paltz with Sierra and Marissa we go into a store that sells small hand soaps in the shape of small hands.

“That is the creepiest effing thing I have ever seen,” I say, gaping down at them, arranged in a ghoulish little formation on a table with their tiny fingers splayed. I’m not particularly squeamish about stuff like that–my sense of humor is frankly tasteless a good portion of the time–but Jesus. It looks like a dozen waxen babies have been tortured in an Iraqi prison camp. I absolutely one hundred percent cannot stop staring.

“It’s a joke,” the shopkeeper  tells me, like maybe I just don’t understand the pun. He rubs his palms together as if he’s washing. “Hand soaps?”

“I get it,” I tell him, and we stare at each other awkwardly for a moment. He’s still rubbing his hands together, and now it’s sort of sinister-like, as if maybe he wants to make soap out of me. “Thanks.”

“You get it? Because–”

“Yup.”

Outside, we cannot stop laughing. I dig my gloves out of my purse.

Fact: ten years ago when I was fifteen I wrote half a novel. It’s blatantly autobiographical, about girls trying to fit in and boys who look like pop stars and people having Big Conversations while standing outside on the street in the middle of the night.

I reread it just now in the middle of looking for something else in that way I have of getting distracted by (not so) shiny things and remembered so clearly how much I liked working on it, how good it felt to come home and finish my homework and write. How doing it felt like a hopeful thing and I thought: this is what I want to be when I grow up.

It is full of embarrassing, ham-handed descriptions and words like “ethereal”.

Other than that, it’s actually not so bad.

1. Resolution #1 for 2011 was “stop eating sandwiches for dinner four times a week like a lazyass” so I broke out all my cookbooks, bought expensive salad dressing and sun-dried tomatoes,  and got to work making PW’s chicken pot pie and Ina’s vegetarian lasagna and chili with actual ground beef in it instead of eleven cans of beans and some red sauce. Two nights ago I made bread pudding. On New Years I made turkey roulade. I want to show you pictures of these things, but I can’t because I dropped my camera and now it won’t turn on. Other things I have dropped lately include: one MacBook (unharmed), one large Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee cup refilled with ice water, one tray of meatballs. We ate the meatballs anyway, though the floor was kind of questionably clean. Resolution #2 for 2011 is: buy a mop.

2. Jackie’s birthday party is this weekend in NYC and we are going ’cause we like her. I asked her what I should wear and she said: “Well, I will be wearing black harem pants like on Gossip Girl.” My sister, ladies and gentlemen.

3. Resolution #3 for 2011 was to read more on my commute instead of spending an hour every morning staring vaguely out the subway window at the wall of the tunnel. This week: Stephen King’s On Writing, and oh man I love that guy. He’s so weirdly wise. Also, did you know that he used to work in an industrial laundromat and also in a mill? Because I did not know those things.

4. Wednesday was a snow day and I spent it in a blue sweater with toggles drinking coffee and watching Friday Night Lights with Tom, who likes Lyla the best but has a soft spot for Riggins. Neither of us really like Street. Both of us really like coffee.

5.  [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF9-sEbqDvU]

Happy weekend. I cannot stop smiling.

On Christmas Day I have a rage blackout so Jackie takes me to the Dunkin’ Donuts palace on Central Avenue. “You’re like one of my kids,” she tells me, as if she’s the big sister. Jackie teaches preschool and has two-year-olds who bite and pinch. “I say to them, ‘You need to take a walk?'”

I need to take a walk.

At the Dunkin’ Donuts palace, which used to be a Kentucky Fried Chicken, we wait in line in front of a man who tells us he is Santa Claus, and that he likes us equally.

“That man is not Santa Claus,” I mutter, though in the moment I do appreciate his eye toward fairness.

Back in the car we turn up the radio and drive south, aimless, talking and not. Jackie tells me stories. I look out the window, cross my ankles, wait for snow.