This Afternoon In Drama

Please Hold

There is too much going on currently.

P.S. Today I had last week's issue of Entertainment Weekly opened to a picture of Lil Kim, and the baby walked up, pointed at her and started laughing. Smart baby.

C. Webb Could Have Been Steadman

Before I leave for New York tomorrow, I need to quickly address the season three debut of America's Next Top Model. Miss Tyra opened the show with her own head, of course, set against a black background, and I immediately thought of one of the manifestations that the Wizard of Oz took to freak out Dorothy and her fellow travelers. In one of my childhood versions of the classic, there is a gigantic, illustrated head hovering above the ground, its forehead bulbous with cranial danger. Seeing Tyra on screen again was a little bit like that. She'd styled her hair so that it was poofed (no, poofed) up and away from her skull, alerting the viewer that this brazen UPN forehead porn was more than intentional, if "more than intentional" is possible. It was Miss Tyra's chosen weapon, and she was brandishing it like, "Beware all ye who enter here, the domain of my forehead. Yee-arrrrggggh." But, just as Dorothy and Gang persevered through the Wizard's intimidations, so I, too, scoffed at Tyra's forehead and entered ANTM fearlessly.

Miss Tyra wants to be Miss Oprah. If I didn't know this through the interviews she's given where she says that she wants to be the next generation's Oprah, then I'd certainly know it by the end of this episode. When Tyra walked out to the hotel pool to greet this season's contestants, they didn't jump to their size eleven feet fast enough, and she had to say, "Stand up y'all! Stand up!" Because you know no one rests on their asses at Harpo studios. Show Typrah some respect, you ungrateful amateur models. After everyone had given her the proper ovation, Tyra felt comfortable enough to slip into her best imitation of Oprah's worst speech pattern, which entails speaking in one's public persona broadcaster voice until the end of the sentence, at which point one devolves into "down home" talk, which is marked by a sped-up delivery and a dropping of grammar, vowels, and hard consonants. It's the equivalent of Disneyland's Splash Mountain. Boredom and decorum reign for the first three-fourths of the ride, and then all hell breaks loose in the last quarter while you're dropping toward the briar patch.

So Tyra would be like, "I want to welcome all of you girls here. I'm so thrilled to have you, and it's important that you understand what a fantastic opportunity this is, because...." (brace yourselves for the drop) "yougonehaftooworkyobuttsoff girls, becausethisthangain'teasayyyy,ifyooknowwanni'msayin?" At which point, Tyra laughed at her own deviation. I've noticed that Oprah goes into this mode when she's starting to feel particularly self conscious about not being funny enough, and she knows that the soul girl talk will get the housefraus in her audience a-tittering. "Did you hear the way she said, 'ain't'? Hilaaaarious." Tyra also slips into the speech pattern when she's uncomfortable- I think at points during which she's not sure she's connecting to the models. Oh, and believe me, Tyra has become all about connecting.

Her first big mistake of the season was calling contestant Eva on her bitchiness during the meet-and-greet. Pulling an Oprah/Dr. Phil hybrid-maneuver, Tyra demanded to know who had treated Eva poorly in her life, causing Eva to turn around and do the same to an overly emaciated competitor. Tyra! If the girls are awful, evil bitches, there's your season. You don't get them to cry and go back to their mortal model enemies and apologize publicly before the official show has even gotten underway. Tyra's begun to let her desire to be the most tough lovingest but compassionate supermodel of all time get in the way of the quality of the ANTM storyline, and that's just bad production values.

Throughout the show, Tyra continued to console and "inspire" and practically go ahead and set up her own book club and "Angel" foundation, but meanwhile, this opening episode lacked the initial competition that has kicked off the other two seasons. Thus, I didn't particularly get to see any of the girls in professional mode, cheating each other out of outfits or mascara or just plain totally fucking it up in front of the camera in a couture bikini. This season's omission leaves me somewhat stranded as to who my early picks are, since I have yet to see the girls do anything except perform their best impressions of "loving buffets!" and kissing Tyra's ass.

I will say, however, that I have a very soft spot for former stripper, Cassie. She's incredibly unstripperlike, and the disjunction is kind of fascinating to watch. Contestant Norelle could actually learn a thing or two from former stripper, Jenna Jameson, who had her brother prematurely pry off her braces as a teen when a Las Vegas strip club wouldn't hire her because she looked too young. That Norelle showed up to this competition with those things on tells me a lot about her Type C personality, and now I've written her off because I know she can't win.

Least favorite contestant so far? Easily Amanda. That's right. I said I hate the blind girl. Miss Tyra was worried about casting the formerly mentioned model with the anorexic aesthetic because she didn't want to send out a troubling message to young women, but I'm not sure what cooing over the "stunning" eyes of someone with a degenerative, blinding disease says either. Amanda basically insinuated that the reason her eyes are so captivating is because they're eating away at themselves. And Tyra loves them! Yeah, I don't know. But it isn't Amanda's blindness that puts me off (although her speech revealing her blindness to fellow contestants made me want to accompany a model to the bathroom to puke). It's the vibe I get off of her. And that vibe is? Drum circle.

I'm off to NY, so I don't know how much I'll be posting over the next few days. All I can say is that I hope there's some top model breakdowns by the time I get back.

Other Digits

Recently, blog reader Ted commented:

"That's one sexy thumb you scanned there, Andrea. Though the DSM teaches us that the grown-out nail incompletely polished is a sure sign of avoidant personality disorder. Looking forward to scans of other digits.

Posted by: Ted | September 2, 2004 08:58 PM"

I aim to please sometimes. Brett's dad took this picture last week without my knowledge, but I actually love it. It's probably my favorite portrait of us. The picture seems to tell a story of me, a corpse, rising up from my grave and grabbing onto Brett's jeaned leg. "I came back alive after I was buried," I say. "That's why I've always said that I want someone to put a video camera down there with me, or at least a doorbell." "You're back from the dead!" Brett says, awed. "That's so hot!" "I think so, too," I say as he lovingly wipes the dirt from my forehead.

You Were Always On My Mind

From what I gather, most couples in the modern age have their celebrity "gimmes." This is a nearly unobtainable person picked by each member of the relationship, a person that they're allowed to sleep with should they ever find themselves in the exceptional circumstance of being in intimate proximity to said celebrity. Maybe it's not just a trend of the modern age. Maybe back in the colonial era there were rumors of unbelievably hot and charismatic guys and chicks over in like, Williamsburg, and couples would make deals in the vein of, "Should you ever come across Governor William Gooch and seduce him with your bountiful bags of grain, you can have him without consequence." Anyway, Brett's is Monica Bellucci and mine is James Spader.

I always figured that Brett had made the poorer choice because Monica spends most of her time on another continent, is pretty smitten with her heavily-accented husband, is heavily desired across the world, and is busy being a first time mother. Those factors make her a fairly long shot. James, on the other hand, is in L.A., where I am, is divorced, and is not as popular of a sex object. I really don't see why it couldn't work out between us, at least for an hour.

I love James. I rarely develop celebrity crushes, aside from Britney Spears, and ever since I laid eyes on him and his inimitable tude in Pretty In Pink, I've been smitten. When he followed that movie with Mannequin, a majorly influential opus of my youth, I barely knew what to do with myself. I've never been able to put my finger on where the lust stems from, precisely. It could be that slightly upturned nose that no one in my entire extended family has, which would clearly draw me to him. It's more likely the impeccable WASP magetism that he exudes (he attended Andover and looks fantastic in light pink- hot!) and his clipped, perfect syllables that always made me want to go put my pillow in a Princeton polo shirt and make out with it. It's also definitely a dash of evil. After Mannequin there was Sex, Lies & Videotape, Crash, and Secretary, each performance burrowing the love even deeper, like the craggy blue bloodlines of the east coast. As I grew older the other girls rattled on about Brad Pitt and Matt Damon and Orlando Bloom, but I never cared a whip for any of them. It was always James who was number one my list. His reemergence on The Practice last year cemented that pole position, as seeing him every Sunday just increased my interest. How can you get sick of Spader? You can't. That's why he stays, forever, as my gimme.

Unfortunately, Spader won the Emmy last night. Yes, I was not only happy for him because he's a stellar, one-of-a-kind talent, but was also happy to see that the Emmy voters aren't as boring and crusty as everyone thinks they are. James' new Emmy, however, was unfortunate because now he moves in the direction of Monica, the award surely making him harder to reach. Before the Emmy I thought it semi-realistic that we might have a depressive (I can see it in his eyes) yet intriguing encounter in a book store (I've read he reads- actually reads), but now he's going to be swamped with movie offers and well wishers and interviews, and I imagine that these factors will drastically cut into James' free time to wander the city and run into me. It also doesn't help that I spend about 99% of my time inside of my house, so that my own wandering around the city is already very, very limited, making our meeting even more difficult due to my lifestyle. Another problem seems to be someone James referred to as "my girl, Leslie" last night at the awards, seemingly the blond sitting next to (I think) James' mother and holding her hand as he spoke. This worries me because James, high on his victory, might carry that wooziness over to the love arena and believe that this Leslie is his lucky charm or his destiny or something equally frustrating, also diminishing my chances of talking him into a one-night stand at the Santa Monica Best Western.

So all I can do is post this post, hoping that James is at least a little vain and fond of doing Google searches for "Spader +Emmy +hot." I'd hate myself if I did nothing to further this venture along.

Hate The Player, Don't Hate The Show

While watching the inaugural (and I'm guessing last) season of UPN's reality show The Player, I felt like I was participating in the televisual equivalent of one-hand clapping. Sometimes shows can just give off an extrasensory feel of alienation, the same kind of quiet reverberation that might quiver through your bones when driving through the desert at night on an empty road, just you and the cyyohhtays. I felt like I might be the only person on the planet watching, even though I knew this couldn't be true. The show just gave off that type of vibe.

Which is odd for a reality show that sets itself in the sweltering sexiness of Miami, casts a unbelievably tan model as its bait, and runs a pimp's dream theme over its opening credits. The premise of the show was that Dawn, a player herself, would live in a house with player suitors, and thin the guys out until only the ultimate player remained. I've used the word "player" three times in that last sentence, and that's because I've found that I have no idea what to interchange it with- and that's because I left the show more confused than ever about what a player is, exactly.

Before I came to the show, I defined the player as someone so smoothe than s/he could bed anyone of his/her choosing with minimal effort, and someone so detached that he/she could walk away the next morning while uttering a moronic line like, "Don't hate the player- hate the game." Incidentally, this line is the "You're fired!" of the show. But it turns out that in order to be the "ultimate player," you have to put in a whole lotta effort so that you don't actually look like you're playing, except you still have to be acknowledged as continuing to play because otherwise you are not a player (but instead a lovesick non-player), except you must pretend to be a lovesick non-player in order to achieve maximum player effect. I know! It's confusing. Dawn moved two of her best friends into the house in order to help her determine who was playing her and who wasn't, except I thought the whole point of the game was to discover who was the very best player. So these girls were just totally at odds with their own purpose- in other words, they went on the show hoping to be fooled into thinking the winner was not a player because then they could crown him the Player Of The Universe.

This is why I liked the show, though. In the Bachelor/Bachelorette genre of romantic reality shows, people sign up under the impression that their "journeys" and "connections" over the course of six weeks will remain once they have to listen to Bachelor Bob's horrifying giggle outside of the context of competition. The women and the men who make it to the final four on these types of shows are always somewhat skeptical until the end ("But how can I trust you when I know you're kissing three other people?" and so on), which is precisely what seems to make them attractive to the chooser. But these contestants always ditch the skepticism in time for the end, believing that "the real world" holds greater promise for their love affair once they can just get away from those pesky paid-for exotic getaways. On The Player, however, Dawn and her girlfriends entered the arena knowing that connections were, by the nature of playing, likely to be bullshit, suspended that disbelief for the course of the show only, which is how disbelief should be suspended on these things, and then came back down to earth by the finale.

Before I go on to discussing the winner, I have to remark that The Player amassed the finest collection of wigger accents ever heard before on network television. Dawn was a wigger princess. I couldn't even begin to count the "Do you know what I'm saying?"s that were tossed around like rice at a wedding. I read an interview in which the producers of The Player prided themselves on collecting an authentically multi-racial cast, since everyone knows that on the other romance reality shows the white girl/guy gets two or three black or asian suitors to select from, dumps all but one in the initial elimination, and then cuts the remaining minority contestant loose during the second round. And while it was pretty refreshing to have watched Dawn exercise her player skills on many types of guys (with one exception- the "non-cheesy" variety wasn't in attendance), I'm unconvinced that it does anything for black males to be kept around on a show looking for the biggest gigolo. I mean, I think the problem with shows of The Bachelor/Bachelorette variety is that their choosees repeatedly send out the message that minority suitors are not realistic lifemates for white people. Seeing as how a "player" doesn't really make an excellent lifemate by nature of being a player, regardless of color, I'm not sure that any sort of barriers have been broken.

Now back to the winner. His name is Acie, which is a hilarious name, and I only realized that it was Acie with an "ie" after looking up from my US Weekly long enough to focus on the spelling on the screen. Previous to the finale, I had just been hearing "A.C." and assuming the obvious, but let that be a lesson to me that the obvious is anything but! Acie: that's a player name. How Acie won I still can't figure out, because on one episode Dawn's friend Jinelle (huge wigger!) asked him to demonstrate his "best game" to her, and Acie simply circled her like he had dropped his keys, and then said reaaaal fast and low, "Heygirlhowyadoingtonightyougottaman?" And Jinelle got a coy smile on her face and started nodding, not like "Yeah I got a man," but like "Oh yeah, you a player!" That seemed like the weakest game ever to me, but then again, I have been effectively wooed by things like wiping blood under one's eyes and having scoliosis. So maybe my player radar is just defective.

When Dawn named Acie the ultimate player, she gave him the choice of trying to be with her, as in Being With Her, or continuing to live his player lifestyle. Acie, of course, chose the lifestyle, because how could he not, wearing that gigantic blinged out "Player" necklace the show gifted upon him moments before? He had to take that jewerly out for a spin at the club because ladies love gigantic kitschy necklaces. The truly revelatory moment of the show was that Dawn was genuinely happy that Acie chose to keep on playing, you could see it on her face and in her eyes, saying that she would have been disappointed if he had chosen otherwise. This sort of shit just doesn't go down on The Bachelor, where girls named Jessica struggle to look satisfied that they received a planet ticket instead of an engagement ring.

A brand new Cadillac Escalade rolled up, Acie's prize for holding down the title, and it looked like he was going to drive off for a second. But then the player rolled down his window, announcing to Dawn that "the player thing to do" would be to get in the car and go freak with him, knowing that there would not, and could not, be any strings attached. With no hesitation, Dawn hopped in, face as bright as Acie's diamond stud earrings. It was such a happy ending. The show's theme song, which has "uhoooh ooh oohs" (you either know the sample, or you don't) picked up, and the two drove off into the Miami heat, neither hating each other nor the game.

What, Is it 5765 Already?

Because of my deep immersion in the Jewish New Year, I am so busy eating the apples and the honey that I don't have time to fully blog. Just kidding. The apples should have been a dead giveaway. But I am spread pretty thin lately, so I'm posting a vintage film bulletin Rosh Hashanah faux-flyer. A big Shalom-out to former editor Castelle, who is one of the biggest mysteries on this planet. (P.S., Holiday-related. Today while watching the actual celebrants walking to temple, I saw an Orthodox girl who was an AlternaJew. This is a new offshoot to me. She was covered head to toe, like the other girls, except instead of a dowdy hankerchief over her head and orthopedic loafers on her feet, she wore a metallic Stevie Nicks scarf, a marriage of goth and bohemia, over her hair and knee-high black go-go boots over her calves. She had a definite swagger. I was fascinated. Almost wanted to follow her to temple. Almost.)

Cheese

Okay, I get what the ad is trying to do. It's trying to say that the symptoms of sexual abuse aren't always necessarily easy to spot in a child. I've come to believe otherwise from avid, avid viewing of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, which has aired numerous episodes about molestation that depict the victim as being withdrawn or unhappy in some visible way, but okay. (On a side note: Who made the decision at L&O: SVU to hire Ice-T? Seriously? That person is subversive. Because the sheer presence of Ice-T on the screen often manages to overturn the whole pro-good-cop, pro-women and women's rights narratives of the episodes, making the show amazingly sub-textually complicated. Do I believe him, do I not believe him? It spins my mind around. The greasy ponytail continually has me leaning toward not believing him.)

But did the girls really have to be this happy in the picture? What does this image achieve over one that might show less "I love my Jordache Jeans!" jubilance, or even one that shows the four girls simply looking at the camera with straight faces? I'm not really convinced that the extreme happiness serves any purpose, other than that I almost flipped past the ad without reading it because I thought it was for sparkle toothpaste.

If I have to take the guess, though, it's the redhead being sexually abused. I narrowed it down to her and the girl above her with the dramatic eyebrows since they both look a little too animated for my liking, which says "putting on a show to conceal the pain" to me, but dramatic eyebrows looks much much comfortable in her state of intense enthusiasm. That leaves the redhead, whose happiness I don't believe, and who has telltale anger in the eyes and in the crinkling at the top of her nose.

Venturing East Of The 405 By Choice

Last night we went to go see The French Kicks play at Avalon, and while they were really fantastic, I was distracted by the utterly bizarre body odor of someone nearby in the crowd. Normally body odor is no mystery- it is metally or it is meaty or it is nutty (not as in "zany," but as in almonds or cashews), and that's that. Last night, though, someone was harboring a putrid mixture of fruit and sweat smells, so that s/he gave off an odor that can best be described as that produced when one lets an apple rot for a week, sticks it under one's armpit, and then dances in the current near-100 degree L.A. heat. It was a very unusual variety of B.O., and it was powerful. It floated over the heads of the crowd in all directions, so that no matter which way I turned, it rounded the corner with me. The only logical guess I can make for this smell is that someone imbibed vast amounts of Sour Apple Schnapps and then excreted it through their normally typical-B.O. manufacturing glands, and the chemical reaction was borderline toxic. I thought maybe my intense reaction to the smell was mine alone, but when I brought it up to Brett after the show, he exhaled with an emphatic, "I know!"

But anyway, The Kicks were great. What I like about them so much is that they sing songs that make me want to go break up with someone. Now, I know certain readers of the blog think that I have a breaking-up fetish, but what they don't understand is that there is a certain epic lifestyle I subscribe to, best accompanied by a soundtrack of music like that The Kicks produce- music that usually always entails some sort of keyboard work, analog or digital, because I believe that the piano is the instrument best equipped to handle the sonic interpretation of the worth of melancholy. This probably has something to do with my deep and inexplicable gut attraction to Elton John's "I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues," and possibly stems from my good vs. evil battles with my childhood piano teacher, who would actually look like he was holding himself back from beating me if he could tell I didn't practice enough during the previous week. Little did he know that instead of going over my Minuet In G, I was upstairs in my bedroom getting down the finer points of "Axel F" from the movie, Beverly Hills Cop on my Casio.

Point being, the piano, for me, raises the emotional quality of a song to a level where I can recognize it, where it finally joins the plane that I exist on. This plane, often misunderstood by others, is one where the ups and downs in life are not injested as simple fluctuations, but instead, are states of being worth dwelling in and being recognized a valuable, separate entities, and not just "part of the flow." I.e. whereas other couples obviously experience their good and bad periods as well, whereas they just slog through them and wait for the next stage to exert itself, Brett and I have a habit of making these almost imperceptible shifts into events. The Kicks do this too. Trent Reznor, god bless his band nerd heart, does it. Fiona Apple, who I've read also likes to sit on couches at parties and not talk to anyone, does it. Jackson Browne, who I have a little bit of a problem recommending because he used to beat Daryl Hannah, and I love Splash, but his album "Late For The Sky" is the most devastating one I've ever heard, does it. And I love "it" more than I could ever express, which is why I'm not in a band.

The One Commandment In My Bible

On July 25th Booksquare predicted that I would be following up my original writing FAQ "with FAQ 2 (where everyone asks her about her writing process – there is an inevitable pattern to these things)." Because I like to destroy preconceived notions, much like a a stoner who asks the attendees at a party, "Do we really know what the color green is? I mean, really? What if my green isn't your green? Ever thought about that?" I'm not putting up that second FAQ. There's no need for it. Because in the recent batch of emails asking me about my writing process, while there have been many questions, there is only One Answer.

That answer? Two pages.

This is how I work and how I have worked since college, when I used the technique for academic essays. Every day I sit down and I write exactly two double spaced pages of my novel. No more and no less, and this is key. The reason it's so important to stick to the designated amount of pages, come hell or highwater, is because you must maintain a superstitious semi-religious belief in the amount of pages you have chosen for yourself.

For instance, I have trained myself to believe that if I do not produce two, usable pages a day, then it will spell doom for whatever project I'm working on. In college this meant a bad grade on a paper. More recently this means that I will receive a bad review of my forthcoming novel in Entertainment Weekly, and that the cover will be even worse than the one on the first book, which is hard to top. Even beyond that, I maintain a vaguely mystical belief that misfortune will visit me in my personal life, should my book not be met with two brand new pages each day- misfortune not so great to totally fuck up my life (because I'm concerned that one day, I won't be able to help missing my two-page window (I'll be delivering a baby in an elevator or something similarly out of my control), and I don't want to jinx myself in a cataclysmic sense), but significant enough to give me a bad week.

Now, you, you do not have to choose two pages. I've read that David Sedaris chooses one. You just have to pick an amount that is A) feasible and realistic for you to complete on a daily basis and B) significant enough (I'm thinking at least a paragraph here) that your work won't read like stuttering. To each her own- I heard on the radio yesterday, and was shocked, that seven minutes is the average time it takes an American to fall asleep at night. That blew my mind because my drifting off period has been closer to an hour lately, and that's on a really good day. So I can't pressure you into the two pages, although I definitely endorse two pages as the best way to go. There is something undoubtedly magical in two pages of daily work.

I try to adhere to a punctual routine for these two pages, too, but this second routine is not affiliated in any way with the superstitious rigors of the two pages themselves, so I am more flexible when it comes to this matter. I do my first page at 7 p.m. and my second at 11 p.m., but these times will often fluctuate depending on what is on TV and how much I want to go bug Brett by trying to put my finger in his ear.

Bottom line: two pages. Maybe you're scoffing and thinking that this doesn't seem like much of a gift, but this just means that you haven't given yourself to le mystère de deux pages. It is a mighty thing to behold, once you're inside the process. For confirmation, ask Geoff, a fairly recent convert.

The reason that most people fail when writing novels (I'm talking discipline-wise and not in terms of "goodness" here) is because they write according to their body and mind's whims. If they're feeling good or especially creative, they write 10 pages. And then they feel so good for having written 10 pages the previous day that they don't write a single page the next day. They think they're ahead of the game. And then, all of a sudden, it's next Wednesday and they're still on page 10: malaise prevails. With the two page a day method, however, one is forced, as if at self-induced gunpoint, to produce a steady flow of work, keeping the story going and, more practically, the pages accumulating. It totally works. Live by it and you will be astounded. And finished one day.

Kibbles And Bits

The other day a Jehovah's Witness and her thirty-something son came to my door. Before I continue, a quick shout-out to the only Jehovah I've ever known and loved, Taryn, whose birthday is just around the corner. In high school I used to have to hide her birthday presents in paper bags and other non-celebratory wrappings, so that her mom wouldn't suspect that we were acknowledging any event other than the eventual sweet day when Jesus would swoop down, hopefully save Taryn (as long as I hadn't tainted her too much, which was always cause for concern), and then banish me to oblivion for being a lapsed Jew. Good times!

Anyway, so this woman came to my door and said, "I'm so happy you're home!" because it was Labor Day. And I was like, "Lady, I'm always home." I didn't know what she was pushing at this point. The other week a wide-eyed girl came to my doorstep, but she was just trying to get me to sign a petition for the environment- as soon as I heard about the weeping ducks and seals, I was ready to take up the pen. Animals will get me every time. If my rabbit told me to cut you or her heart would break, I'd cut you.

The Jehovah's witness never mentioned Jehovah or religion, but instead whipped out the opening line, "Do you want to be happy?"

In my mind, I was thinking, "Not really. Because I don't think happiness actually results from being happy." But, not having the time or patience to deal with whatever she wanted from me, I told the lady to cut to the chase. She said, "We all want to be happy! And I have the key to happiness!"

In her hands she held two low-budge magazines. She smartly put The Watchtower (the dead giveaway) on the bottom, and the one with the puppies on the top. "Puppies!" my dumb brained jumped. I'm like a puppy about puppies. "Puppies!" So I accepted the literature that she was extending toward me. I might have even converted to Witnessdom on the spot if she had brought a puppy to my door and let me hold it.

The weird thing about this interaction was that the whole time the woman was talking to me, she was staring at my crotch. I noticed, but didn't want to look down, too, because then we'd both be staring at my crotch, and where do you go from there? Her son hung around in the background, at the bottom of my steps, shy.

The woman smiled big and reiterated, "We all want to be happy!" I said, "I'm really busy right now," and shut the door. What she didn't realize was that before her knock, I had been in the midst of my own personal happiness, writing my second novel, and she had interrupted me. One girl's treasure, another woman's damnation.

After I dropped the puppy booklet on my kitchen counter, I looked down at my jeans to see what was going on, if Satan had manifested in my zipper. If the Virgin Mary can materialize in window panes, why not? It was then that I saw that I'd never rebuttoned and zipped my jeans from when I had been napping earlier that day, and I was wearing see-through lilac underwear. The Jehovah crusader had been transfixed by my biznass.

"Oh well," I sighed, and sat down at my computer to continue working on my sex-in-the-infirmary scene. "I have the key to true happiness," I thought, "and it's how to guarantee finishing a novel." My technique is tried and true. Simple, yet miraculous. I told my friend Geoff I should write a book, except it would really only be a paragraph. So more about it on Friday.