But Call Me Betsy

We've been talking for the last several months about getting a dog, so much so that a part of me thought that maybe one would appear at Christmas, and when that didn't happen, I thought maybe it would occur on my birthday last week. No dice. Anyone who knows me for more than five minutes understands that I love animals, and especially dogs and cats, and then anyone who knows me for more than fifteen minutes learns that I miss my cats, who are now under the constant care and supervision of my mom back in Philadelphia. I never had a pet growing up, unless you count fish, and I don't. To me, animals you can't pet or interact with are non-pets. Real fish are 1,000 times worse than say a stuffed pretend fish, because they require care and they appear to be trapped in these small containers and they don't interact and then they die, sometimes in dramatic suicide- like events where they throw themselves out of the tank, and you find them later, when you step on their dri...

Until like, three days ago, I always thought of "middle ages" as a particular year---and then, only a year. I never contemplated the topic very closely, wanting to perpetually believe that I am about 23. I remember reacting with irritation when a colleague of mine was lamenting the fact that he was middle-aged at 40. I thought he was being overly-dramatic and that he should just go ahead an buy the convertible hot rod already. But then my friends and I were talking the other day and it dawned on me that "middle aged" is a span of time in your life, like the teen years, only closer to death. I'm not sure what decades signify middle age--is it 40s to 50s? Does it end when you qualify for social security? Or does it end when you start relating to the late night commercials about osteoporosis and Viagra? Do the middle ages begin the first time someone calls you "ma'am?" And then also, what are the thirties called? Pre-middle ages or post-college year...

I don't know why it is over the last couple of years that I've forsaken most novels about love and family and coming-of-age for the one where ten girls are murdered and one troubled detective tries to solve the case while also struggling with her own demons. I've never really written any genre work around police investigations or crime. The closest I've come is that noir story for Philadelphia Noir . And yet I'm now reading almost only books that are Edgar Award winners or, more often than not, regular mysteries and detective stories that don't spend so much time nursing relationships. Escape, is that what these books are? Anyway, I skimmed one the other day by Lisa Scottoline, a book my mom checked out from the Plainsboro Library and said was a page turner. She liked it okay, but said it wasn't the greatest, so I started it and was immediately suspicious of the set-up, and forced her to tell me if I 'd guessed the plot of the book within twenty page...

The premise of Fox's newest reality show, I Wanna Marry Harry , is that you get together a bunch of single, moderately attractive American women who have been told that they're on a Bachelor type reality TV program with an eligible man, but that's all they know. As the show unfolds, they are introduced to the bachelor, who, in this case, is a doppelganger for Prince Harry. The producers work hard to make the set up plausible, by flying this look alike in on a helicopter, surrounding him with secret service guys, giving him a British butler ala Chris Harrison who refers to him cryptically as "sir," and situating it all in a stone castle. I mention all this to explain the total heinousness of the program, whose sole purpose is illustrate how stupid and desperate women can be. And it does seem pretty dumb to think that the Prince of Wales would agree to go onto a reality show to find his wife. If you know even a teeny bit about the royal family, you might question ...

I don't know why the producers of this season hate Andi so much, having given her the biggest group of doofuses that have ever been on the show. Quick examples: knit cap in April, the Gold's Gym worker with the Dippety Doo hair style, no on owning a razor. First date goes to Eric, who died later in supposedly unrelated para-sailing accident. It will be impossible to comment on this date in any kind of snarky way without sounding like a total jerk They are making sand angels and he did say, "I feel like we've already known each other for months already..." CBS has sent a helicopter for them to ride in and no pilot appears to be present. What if that was your job? The helicopter driver for The Bachelorette . Would that be depressing, or, if you were like me, would you bring it up in conversation whenever possible? They go from sand angels to snow boarding and Andi is way better at it than I would be, which means that she sucks. I am not saying anything about h...

I was at my mom's house with my bestest long lost friend visiting from Idaho via Iceland on Monday, and so unable to blog for the season premiere of The Bachelorette, but we did watch it. About ten minutes in to it, my mom said, Why are you watching this when all you're doing is making fun of it? That's the whole point, mom. Synopsis of two hours of nonsense: No variation in approach or style. They still say, "I'll see you inside!" every time. The guys were nothing to write home about, unless you were wanting to write home to say how average and douche-y each one was. Can you say that each one was more douche-y than the one before? The show is led by 26 year old criminal prosecutor attorney cum Land's End model, Andi Dorfman. She's a pretty straight-forward brunette with a kind of softball-playing persona who will nevertheless cry 15 times over the next several weeks as she's forced to go in helicopters, jump off waterfalls, kiss on the beach wit...

I'm attempting to read The Janissary Tree and it's largely incomprehensible to me--like, I'm not sure what's happening ever. In part, that's because my brain shuts down whenever I'm faced with geographical or historical details, or anything involving the military. I tend to quickly go into skim mode and lose the thread of the story or the significance of the pause in action. A sentence like "Along the rolling hills, just west of the banks of the Tigris-Euphrates, the General Zwick of the Napoleonic army commanded 500 men to hoist their bayonets above their heads and engage in one of the most strategic battles in the Crimean War" has me folding down the corner of the page and possibly throwing the book across the room. I tried very hard last night to keep focused on the action and the asides, but the best I can tell you is that the book is about a(n?) eunuch trying to solve a few murders that have occurred near a sultan. Said murders may or may not...

Dan Chaon wrote one of my favorite short stories ever, "Fitting Ends."  I stole some of the ending of the story for a couple of my own stories, where the narrator tells you how the story ends, and it all wraps up well and then you realize that the conclusion is not true, it's just the ending the narrator wishes had happened. I haven't read Fitting Ends in a while, but I remember that it's about two brothers.  One dies or runs away (Dale?) and the other brother feels responsible for his demise, like he betrays his sibling and sets in motion this chain of events that lead to his bad ending. In this way, it's similar to what Briony does in Atonement . Maybe I should write a story where the narrator believes some tragedy is her fault and the reader knows that really, the whole thing would've turned out badly regardless of how she behaved. Last night, I finished Chaon's Await Your Reply . In this book, there are three different stories happening at one ti...

This is an essay I wrote for the last issue of Philadelphia Stories about poetry.     Here's how you start a poem. First, find a subject matter that’s dear to your heart (and try to work the phrase “dear to your heart“ into the poem if you can). Possible topics include: death of your grandma, death of your cat, death of your friend’s hamster, death of your virginity. Once you have a topic, begin constructing your lines with the intent to confuse the reader. Never use an obvious word when you can choose a mysterious one. For example, instead of writing the word “yellow” substitute “corn,” so that a line that could read “her hair glowed yellow” will instead be more intriguing as “her hair glowed corn.” The whole point of poetry is to prove that you are smarter than your reader; you want the person reading your poem to wish she could call you up and ask, “What did you mean when you wrote ‘with moon so deep the harvest purple’?” ...

Met Dan at Whole Foods in Princeton for lunch today, and had two negative encounters in the store within ten minutes.  The first one wasn't even directed at me. Dan ordered a tea from the dreadlocked guy behind the gelato counter and the guy said, "What size?" Dan said, "Tall." The guy made a face and said,"Man, just so you know, if you order it that way again, you're going to take a lot of shit from the staff. That's not what we call it here." The dude then turned to this lady who was sampling gelato and said, "I already told you that's coconut. I am not lying to you."  I thought we had descended into another retail world, like Lowe's where you expect none of the people working there to want to talk to you. I get that it sucks to be in the service industry and this guy is sick of people using Starbucks lingo, and maybe he's studying to get his PhD in linguistics and hates how corporate America has bought the collo...

I can take partial credit for this because this is my coffee maker. It has stopped working. He would like me to be sure to mention that this is a metaphor for life. How, like, you just keep pushing the button even when you know something is not working and it makes a bad buzzing noise.

I'm reading this nonsense book by Jack Handey (the guy from SNL who writes the "Deep Thoughts" pieces as in "just as bees will swarm about their nest to protect their honey, so will I swarm about my basket to protect my chocolate eggs). Okay, that wasn't very funny, but sometimes, they are. His book is called The Stench of Honolulu and it's just goofy, making fun of the hard boiled detective genre and having a joke of some kind in every paragraph. It reminds me that writing is supposed to fun, not painful. Or that you can write to make yourself laugh, which I can do sometimes.  Here's an excerpt from the book( 3 paragraphs melded together): When my friend Don suggested we go on a trip to the South Seas together and offered to pay for the whole thing, I thought, Fine, but what's in it for me? I had been dating this woman and we were really being in love. I can't remember her name right now, but she's great. I knew Don would ask me again....

Had an impulse book grab at the Plainsboro library yesterday as we were checking out with a movie. We went there so that Luke could get his own library card, even though he has one for Princeton--at least he and Dan can now go get movies if they want them over the summer. The movies there are free, as long as you return them within four days (aside, we got Spiderman 3 . If you haven't seen it, don't bother. Tobey Macguire, whom I usually like,  couldn't be less palatable of convincing as a superhero, and there are like fifteen subplots, now of which make much sense and then movie is also about fifteen hours long). Anyway, I grabbed this book after just a cursory glance, catching the phrase, "as good as Alfred Hitchcock," but later, after reading the actual plot synopsis on the book flap and the first few chapters, I decided that it wasn't for me. The plot involved a judge who dies on New Years Eve in his office, and his two legal assistants who decide no...

I want to write a short story where the title is "She Got Fat." Start with that title and the first few sentences, something like, "Somewhere along the way, Marjorie had gotten fat. It hadn't happened all at once, but slowly, over the course of several years and two babies and however many Boston Cremes from Dunkin Donuts." Or maybe it's not about Marjorie, but it's about that phenomenon that occurs almost exclusively on Facebook now where you connect with friends from high school or college or wherever and you haven't seen them in ten or fifteen years, and the first thing you think is, Oh, my God, she got fat .  And also, Oh, my God, she got old . And "she got fat" and "she got old" can't be happening to me, because even though others might be balloon up around the face and getting this crusty middle age look, I can't possibly be among them because I'm still about seventeen years old. RIGHT? In the olden days befo...

I've been waiting for Lorrie Moore's newest collection to come out (let's be real, I've been waiting to be able to check it out from the library--I didn't buy it), and then yesterday, in between doctors appointments, I found it at the li-berry. If you haven't heard of it, the title is Bark , and it contains eight short stories, the first of which is pretty long and could almost be a novella. Padhraig read it too, and he finds her verbal cleverness and word play to be distracting sometimes; I don't usually have that problem with her stories, but I know she's prone to writing characters who are academics and say nerdy, funny things. This collection is...maybe not as interesting as others? Maybe less shiny? It's not like she's trying to hard, it's like she's not trying much at all. Like her agent said, Snap, snap! We need a book. And she coughed up these stories while also maintaining frequent status updates on Facebook (I could be proj...