Uh, gee. I meant to update my live journal. Really, I did.
Kind of like I meant to eat only one piece of the cake I made instead of playing an insane game of “evening up the ends” with a knife till I’d consumed enough cake to induce diabetic coma.
It’s been a wild two months. There have been lots of signings and this and that for Rebel Angels, which is all cool but does leave me with a feeling of, wait, where am I? Was I supposed to be somewhere/do something today? Do I have clean socks? Where, exactly, do I live?
Also, we put our apartment up for sale and let me just tell you that having to keep the place clean on a regular basis is a herculean task. I feel like I’m living on the HGTV channel. “Let’s put lemons in a bowl on the coffee table. No! Green apples! We need green apples and candles!” Jeez, it’s like the real estate version of dating–trotting out your apt.’s best self in high heels, hoping it doesn’t have spinach in its teeth and won’t end up nursing a beer in a dark corner of the bar, alone, singing along to sad songs on the jukebox.
But enough about the trials and tribulations of NY real estate. I’m sorry that my website was having a total meltdown for much of October. Turns out that my hosting guys had switched to fiber optics and something somewhere wasn’t switched over for me. (Clearly, I don’t understand it though it was explained to me three times, in details, with bright, colorful, fuzzy animal pictures. Technology and I. We go together like peanut butter and salmon spread.) Anyway, the point is, everything is cool now, thank god. I was afraid I was going to have to figure out how to do shadow puppetry or a slide show of bad haircuts or something to hold the space until it went back up again. You have all been spared by the server gods.
I have started book #3. Sort of. Well, by started I mean I’ve been eating my son’s leftover Halloween candy while staring at the screen and typing in things that I’m pretty sure suck. But it’s something, right? I was having such a hard time writing this book. I figured it was because I no longer possess the ability to complete sentences, thoughts, and ideas in any interesting way, or to create similies and metaphors that don’t make me immediately want to put a spike through my frontal lobe to block the hideousness of my crappy writing from all memory banks, but my friend Cheryl said, “Goodbyes are hard.” And I thought, yeah. It’s hard to write the last chapter. It’s hard to say goodbye to Gemma, Felicity, Pippa, Ann, and Kartik. I find myself saying, “Hey, I can always come back.” Goodbyes are hard.
It is time for me to make the all-important book #3 playlist. I need dark, brooding music, people. Going-up-against-the-bad-creatures-in-the-Winterlands music. I am open to suggestions. Post away.
Speaking of iPods, some friends (who shall remain nameless, as will their musical choices…) and I were discussing our most embarrassing iPod songs the other day. I’m not just talking the song title you would use your hand to shield from another person’s view. I’m talking the kind of embarrassing song that, should you be hit by a car and lie bleeding in the street, you would use every last ounce of life left to you to stretch out your arm and delete from your iPod so that no one would get up at your memorial service and say, “And now, we’d like to play one of her favorite songs, a song she was listening to at the end. And we hope that, just as she did, you will take comfort in the lyrics, ‘You can dance/you can jive/having the time of your life/Ooh-ooh-oooh/See that girl/Watch that scene/Digging the Dancing Queen…'” Because really, who wants to go out like that? Anyway, I decided that my most embarrassing iPod song would have to be “Xanadu” by Olivia Newton-John. Not only is it a truly sucky song, but it’s from an equally hideous movie musical from the 1970’s when, apparently, movie execs would blow their noses and money would come out for making movies that, in the cold light of 30 years’ hindsight, must make them think, “Holy turd factory, I could have bought Microsoft stock instead of putting the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton into a musical!” I have other embarrassing songs: ABBA, “S.O.S.” Barbra Streisand, “Don’t Rain on My Parade.” The Theme from “Shaft.” The kind of songs that generally require an empty house, a generous amount of lip synching into a hairbrush, and the fervent hope that no one comes home early.
Weeeelll. Okay. That’s certainly enough disclosure for one day.
Note to self: delete the Olivia Newton-John just in case the 9th Street bus clips that corner a little too close. If anyone decided to play “Xanadu” at my funeral, though, I promise I would come back to haunt them.