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Number three on the list: Make a souffle. Thanks, M.

i spent a lot of my time at emerson wanting to punch people in their faces. i forget that i also spent a lot of time wanting to give people hugs.

1. google docs: prologue to the novel

2. answers.com : “Is Rahm Emmanuel missing a finger?” (answer: yes.)

3. youtube: Jesse McCartney, Shake

1. Marissa is here! And she is staying! And it takes me 12 minutes exactly to walk to her apartment, and her closet is as big as my guest bedroom, and her kitchen has space to do cartwheels and bake enormous cakes. We’re going to cook our faces off and do Martha Stewart crafts and go to yoga and drive around in her Cube. I am so lucky to have her back.

2. I was concerned about the overall quality of my Friday morning, so I stopped for a rosemary-olive oil bagel to give it a helping hand. I am happy to report that things improved markedly from there. Behold the mood-elevating power of simple carbohydrates.

3. This Is Where I Leave You, recced by one Miss A. Becker, is hilarious and heartbreaking and flying right by. It’s the kind of book that makes you snort-laugh on public transportation, and that is my kind of book.

4. Everything about Dunkin’ Donuts. Seriously. The ubiquity of Dunkin’ Donuts is, hands down, the best thing about living in Massachusetts, and I don’t think the amount of time I spend either inside or holding a product from this iconic New England purveyor of caffeinated beverages is adequately reflected on this blog. I fully believe that in Heaven there is a newly remodeled Dunkin’ Donuts Palace on every corner, and you think to yourself, man, I’d really like a delicious iced coffee, and one just appears in your hand, and that is how you know you’ve lived a life worthy of eternal reward.

5. Tomorrow I’m going to Salem with H and then to see The Laramie Project with the book club girls. Sunday I am going to eat pesto and hibernate. Happy, happy.

On the fridge in Abbey’s house is a giant bumper sticker that says f*ck cancer, and the invitation to the memorial they held for her dad. Just walking in the door is like getting shot up with girl power: there’s pizza and wine and Food Network, a screened-in porch where we curl under blankets and read the paper while it rains. We keep asking if we can help and her mom keeps saying, sit, sit.

We sit.

*

Our intentions are very lofty; there is art to see and national culture to absorb. Pioneer Woman is at the Book Festival and I want to go meet her so I can ask what in the hell was up with her chicken spaghetti, but after a breakfast of candied bacon lollipops and a long walk in the heat we are absolutely too close to a swoon to do anything but charge into the first air-conditioned building we pass, which happens to be the train station, and sit in a bar all afternoon. We drink beer, debate the politics of infidelity, and contemplate the Island Oasis machine.  I make Lisa tell me every boyfriend she ever had. “Can you believe we’ve all only known each other a year?” she asks me later, at the airport. Lisa has the bluest eyes of anyone I’ve ever met.

“Is that right?” I ask her. “That can’t be right.”

*

I like DC a lot. I think I could live there, in a brownstone  or something, in that alternate version of my life where I wear Banana Republic suits all the time and go for runs along the Potomac. I indulge in the fantasy for a little while, imagine myself writing speeches for a Congresswoman, heels clicking down the hall.

*

At Cafe Atlantico we share ceviche and guacamole and all kinds of delicious business, lamb and scallops and a bottle of wine. We linger. Our waiter is bearded and bespectacled, a horticulture student and amateur vintner. He asks if we have any questions and Sophie cocks her head to the side, smiles. “What’s your favorite vegetable?”

He’s thoughtful, takes a moment. “I mean,” he says eventually. “Vegetable is really more of a grocery term.”

Sophie gazes back at him, deadpan. “Good to know,” she says.

We order dessert.

*

We go to the Smithsonian to see Julia’s enormous kitchen, wander the cases of Inaugural gowns. We consider ice cream. We find a guy to take our picture in front of the Washington Monument but when he hands the camera over the shot is backlit and all you can see is shadow and sunshine, heads tilted against a blue sky.

should be the name of our Food Network show. Washington, DC, September 2010.

1. Book Club Field Trip to go see Abbey in DC this weekend! I fully intend to stuff my face and search desperately for Deputy Chief of Staff Joshua Lyman.

2. Kendi’s style blog, which is super cute and actually useful to my life the way, frankly, a lot of style blogs are not. I feel like my outfits are better already.

3. Fantastic Mr. Fox: such an unbelievable treat. I giggled and clapped the whole way through like a small child. George + Meryl! George + Meryl, people. Dear Wes Anderson, I wish I wasn’t so embarrassed to love you, because I suspect you actually have a lot of heart.

4. Tom, on the return of my perpetually recurring cold-weather cough: “You know, you look pretty good on the outside, but all your individual inside parts are just crap. You’re like…a Hyundai.”

5. Phone calls with my baby sister wherein I press her for the intimate details of her romantic life and remind her of her familial obligations, e.g. a visit to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the subsequent drinking of 100 beers. Hang in, J. I love you a lot.

Happy weekend. I feel good about this one, I really do.

I got an email yesterday from a woman at some company that makes signs offering me window clings to give away so that more people will read this blog.

So, question: if I offered you the chance to win some window clings, would you send your friends my way?

(That is rhetorical.)

Although, what if I just start giving away the randomest shit I can think of?

Window clings, a year’s subscription to Guns and Ammo, a litter of naked mole rats, a flugelhorn.

I could be that blogger who gives away weird stuff. That could be my schtick.

I hear that, to get more people to come to your blog, you’re supposed to have a schtick.

*

I’m reading Slow Love, by Dominique Browning, who was the editor of House and Garden until it folded in 2007. I thought it was going to be one of those nice books that tells you to calm down and sip tea and plant hydrangeas, or something, but I’m halfway through it now and it turns out to be about this affair she had with a man who wouldn’t leave his wife, and also how hard it is when you have to pare down all your expensive belongings to fit in a bungalow by the sea, and also how people at Conde Nast were mean to her because she didn’t wear enough designer clothing. Plus she obviously knows I am judging her, because she keeps talking about what a feminist she is. As in: “I’m a feminist, but I still believe in Prince Charming.”

I mean, that’s cool.

I’m a feminist, and I still believe in the Easter Bunny.

*

Anyway the point of all this is that Dominique has a blog, also, on which she talks about getting pedicures with her friend Byron. I found said blog when I googled her because I am shallow and wanted to see what she looked like, not realizing that there was a picture of her sipping tea in front of hydrangeas on the back of the book.

Said blog, to my knowledge, does not offer the opportunity to receive window clings.

*

I wonder about memoir, about memoirs by women in particular, about why I tend to feel so annoyed as I read them–Eat Pray Love syndrome, or something. Which is interesting, because anyone who looks at this blog for three seconds could tell you that frivolity doesn’t bother me. I love frivolity! I traffic in frivolity! And there are some lady memoirs–BK’s Animal Vegetable Miracle, for example, or I Was Told There’d Be Cake–that absolutely destroy me, that I force on my friends, that make me want to find their authors and invite them to sit at my lunch table in perpetuity. I think what irks me most is the idea that for a memoir to be serious or good, first the author has to convince us how Hard her life is, and what Problems she has. Dominique Browning’s life isn’t hard–anyone who devotes ten pages to shopping for Brooks Brothers pajamas does not have a hard life–and that’s totally fine, but let’s just put that out there before we start extolling the healing powers of Bach and long strolls through Central Park.

I don’t know. Maybe I should read some Mary Karr or something. That chick is messed up on the real.

Or maybe I should just go watch Bones.

*

Hey reader types: let’s talk about this. What are your favorite memoirs?

First three people to comment will receive a cassette tape of Ace of Base’s 1994 classic The Sign.

There’s a woman I see on the train every day, a blond chick who’s twenty-nine or thirty, and she’s sort of exquisitely lovely except she always wears these long straight skirts and those J.Crew platform flipflops, the kind I used to wear in tenth grade. Since I started noticing her she’s gotten engaged and then married, and she carries a tote bag of no particular repute.

I imagine her going home at night, to one of those old apartment buildings on the other side of Mass Ave before you get to Fenway, and her husband is watching the Sox game and they eat things like baked chicken for dinner. I imagine her mind is very, very calm.

*

I’m writing a novel. That’s what the project is.  Somebody important wants to read it when I’m done so obviously I am a hollering lunatic.

*

We go to see The Town, which I love so hysterically much I want to find Ben Affleck and kiss him on his sentimental face and say, I always knew you were the brains of that operation. I wonder if Ben and Matt are still friends, if they have dinner with their pretty wives, if they call each other to say, nice work, jackass, or what’s another word for love. I sort of know better, but I hope.

Tom says: “Tell me why you liked it so much,” not because he didn’t but because it had more car chases than I tend to enjoy, and I think about it all the way to the bus stop at which point I decide:

“It did everything I want to do.”

*

I bake chocolate chip banana bars, which are delicious. I babysit. I finish Consider the Lobster and feel smug. I make to-do lists with the express purpose of checking items off, staving off panic with a felt-tip X.

Where’s the writing, Writer Girl?

*

In 1998 or 99 there was a series of YA books about teenage girls meeting their favorite celebrities and going on dates with them.

I think I probably would have been good at those.

*

I write a sentence and delete it. I research, sort of. I watch TV. I bang out frantic emails to my word tribe, begging them to fix me. I fear a life spent answering phones. I scrub my face with goat’s milk soap until my skin is tight and squeaky, as if my problem is sebaceous in nature.

“How’d that work out for you?” Tom asks.

“Shut up,” I say, and prepare a complicated dinner.

*

I think I should have gone to library school. I think I should have taught. I think I am hideously, terrifyingly stupid for thinking I could do this, and then I remember that this is all there is.

On, then.