Much like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, my family and I decided we wanted to go to Pismo Beach. Unlike Bugs and Daffy, we did not end up in a cave fighting with a man in a turban.

Because this was a family getaway, first thing we did was drop our stuff at a hotel and, instead of taking off our clothes, getting into bed, and seeing what was on Pay-Per-View, we headed into downtown San Luis Obispo to look for Gum Alley.

Disgusting, isn’t it?

Yes, to most people, it is. To the remaining few, it’s the best excuse ever invented to quickly stuff five pieces of gum in your mouth and then mash them onto a public surface.

My purse is filled with hand sanitizer, in case you were wondering.

SO ANYWAY, San Luis is close to our hearts for other reasons. It’s adorable, it’s cute, it’s precious, it’s leafy, it has a BevMo, and it’s got the only remaining Tom’s Toys on the coast. We love Tom’s. We used to have a Tom’s in Santa Barbara, which was run by a nice older man who had a hook for a hand and who’d show it to the kids if they asked. Tom’s always has tons of interesting toys, very few of which need to be plugged in or filled with batteries to work. Yay, Tom’s.

I call this photo, “HALF-PRICE BAKUGAN OH MY GOD DAD GET ME UP THERE RIGHT NOW.”

Me Hung Lo Chinese restaurant. Yes, I am twelve.

If you ever happen to successfully tunnel through to Pismo and you’re not morally repulsed by the spectacle of dozens of people wearing giant bibs and shoveling our crustacean brethren into their gullets, may I recommend The Cracked Crab? It’s unbelievably good. Jackson likes their chicken strips, of course, OF COURSE he wouldn’t eat seafood in a seafood restaurant, my God, who would? I gave him and his crabby friends a pass because of their astrological significance in his life. (Cancers are sensitive.)

The next day we took a walk along some coastal pathway that led us to this, uh, long sandy place, I forget what it’s called.

THIS thing, I swear. It followed me for like 200 feet. I’d turn my back and then I’d hear this SSHHH SSSHH SSSHHHH sound and then I’d whip back around and BAM! It would try to look innocent and be all, “Huh? What? Me?”

I got a mug shot, though. This is not the first time I’ve been menaced by foliage.

Then we got down to the, uh, place with all the sand and shells and stuff, and Jackson found a rock with all its wee crevices filled with wee sea urchins that would squirt when he poked them. Tired, angry, fucking pissed off little echinoderms who were probably all, GODDAMN IT, WHY ARE PEOPLE ALWAYS POKING US, IS IT THE SQUIRTING? WE SQUIRT WHEN YOU POKE US, WE CAN’T FUCKING HELP IT! LEAVE US ALONE, ARRRGHHHH!!”

That’s what I image they’re thinking, anyway. Poke, poke, poke.

Jack has a keen eye for sea glass, no matter how wily and/or elusive it tries to be.

On the way back home we were driving through Buellton and we were all, “Hey, the ostrich farm! We haven’t been there in years! Let’s ironically stop with all the other people who are stopping ironically and take a bunch of ironic pictures!” For the kids, of course.

I’m so happy to have a web site again. It’s like I’ve been MUTED for WEEKS. I’m like the J. D. Salinger of the Internet! Except, of course, that I’m not. But the is war over, so let’s celebrate with cat gifs!

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Thanks to many hours put in by the handsome, unflappable Joe, my enormous blog has migrated from Blogger to WordPress. I have some mixed feelings about this — I wasn’t all FUCK YOU, BLOGGER, YOU SUCK! when they announced they were withdrawing support for the unwieldy circus my uploading procedures had (apparently) become. It’s just that our needs weren’t the same anymore. It was like breaking up with someone I still really liked, who always treated me pretty well and he had a certain style and we totally liked the same kind of peanut butter, but then suddenly he told me that to keep the relationship together I’d have to move to Beijing.

So since he was moving out anyway, I thought I’d redecorate.

My other news, of course, is that Alice and I delivered the manuscript for Let’s Panic to St. Martin’s Press Monday morning at 1:45 a.m. Eastern time so our editor would find it in her inbox when she arrived at work. (This was Alice’s idea. I was thinking of sending it around noon, maybe? After a late breakfast?) Surprisingly, to me, maybe not to you, after pulling several 16-hour days of writing and editing and IM’ing and losing the ability to tell if anything I’d written was funny anymore, I woke up Monday morning to discover my eyes hurt. I had legitimately overworked my eyeballs, my eye stems — all my eye appurtenances. My little eye biceps were tired, you guys! These drugstore reading glasses have done me no favors, I suppose. Apart from making it possible to read. So I need to find a good ophthalmologist, or maybe just an optometrist, and I’d go to Wikipedia to remind myself of the difference right now but, OW, IT HURTS TO LOOK AT THINGS, OW.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

This is a lovely book about a subject that kind of floats like an iceberg as you’re coming toward it. On the surface you see the fresh-faced young wives of Jackson, Mississippi in 1962, but just below the surface a massive chunk of civil rights is waiting to puncture…the hull of white comfort?

On one side of the story we have a circle of white girlfriends who’ve known each other forever. They’re all in their early twenties, all married with children except for one ugly duckling who graduated without her MRS degree, Skeeter Phelan. Skeeter loves her friends and playing bridge and editing the Junior League newsletter, but she’s restless. She wants to Write. A New York editor responds to Skeeter’s resume, telling her to find a subject she cares about, something close to her heart. Skeeter takes a hard look around her and finds the first thread of her story: Constantine, the black maid who raised her and who was probably the person she loved most in the world until Skeeter’s mother fired her without explaining why.

Since her mother won’t talk about Constantine, Skeeter slowly begins to approach Constantine’s peers, who also happen to work as maids for all of Skeeter’s friends, to see if they’ll give her any information. They won’t talk to her, of course, at first, but Skeeter’s slow but steady efforts to earn the trust of one maid in particular, Aibileen, form the hub of the novel.

The author concentrates mostly on the emotional core of the story, dropping in historical details (Vietnam, Medgar Evers’ murder) for little shocks of context.

Honestly, this was the first page-turner I’ve read in a long time. Emotionally it rang really true to me. It was also somewhat horrifying to realize that the precautions Skeeter and Aibileen take to meet in secret and work on the maids’ stories make it sound like they’re living in Nazi Germany; the consequences of their “race betrayal” could truly result in both of them ending up beaten, shunned, in hiding, or dead.

I’ve read some criticism about the author using dialect for the black characters and perfect, unaccented English for the white characters, and I suppose that’s a valid complaint. That said, I found the black dialect didn’t take much effort to read, and I just assumed the white characters had Southern accents, so…?

The point being, I liked this book. Should I give it a rating? Okay, I give this book four cantaloupes for being tough on the outside, sweet on the inside, and a healthy part of a nutritious breakfast.

Do you eat cereal for breakfast? I eat cereal for breakfast. Two years of oatmeal did wonderful things for my cholesterol, I’m sure, but OATMEAL BURNOUT. So: cereal. During college I discovered the joys of mixing two or three different cereals together, but I no longer live in my lovely old co-op dorm where we had 24-hour access to coffee, tofu, and fourteen different kinds of cereal. Ah, those heady days when I could roll out of bed, shuffle through a haze of cigarette smoke, and come to while shoveling a bowl of Life/Cap’n Crunch/Grape Nuts into my mouth.

I have to buy my own cereal now. Cereal is expensive, so I usually only have two boxes max on hand at any one time. Right now it’s 11:30 a.m. on a Sunday and my post-yoga, who-needs-food? high is fading, and I’m poised to saunter into the kitchen and construct a bowl of what I have at the moment, which is Post Raisin Bran (I like Post because the raisins aren’t all sugared up like they are in Kellogg’s Raisin Bran) and Peanut Butter Panda Puffs. I love these cereals separately, my God I do, but together they’re somewhat of a disaster. The Raisin Bran sinks to the bottom and gets ungodly soggy while you’re dealing with the Panda Puffs, which have all floated to the top to demand you pay attention to them first.

My breakfast life is hell. Surely you can help. Tell me some good cereal combinations? I feel so lost right now.

Occasionally my yoga teacher, Steve, does this thing in class where he asks us to stand slightly bent over, with our hands on our knees, and breathe. Breathe all the way in until we feel like we’re going to burst, then all the way out until our lungs feel flat. We do this in-and-out thing a couple of times and then we breathe in our fullest breath and hold it. He tells us it’s not a contest, to let out our breath when we need to, but when we feel that instinctive, almost panicky feeling that we can’t hold it another second, hold it one more second. Then breathe. But don’t let the panic decide.

That moment — when the panic’s standing there looking at you in shock for your insubordination — must be like when a pendulum gets to the top of its swing and just floats there for a moment, thumbing its nose at gravity.

Then we do a few more rounds of deep in and out breaths, and then we blow everything out and hold it. That’s the one that gets you, having no air in your lungs at all. No one can hold out nearly as long, the instinct to get air into your lungs becomes unendurable pretty quickly. But wait, says Steve, for one second beyond what you think you can endure. Don’t give it what it wants.

He says this strengthens our neural pathways. I believe him. Steve can do things, things you’d think were impossible.

Suddenly, last week, after years of doing this exercise, the broader lessons began to apply as well. I realized that when I feel a tiny jolt of anxiety about whatever, a dirty dish, or I had ten things to do in the time it would take to do one of them well, I could think: Don’t buckle. That’s what it wants. Pause first. It’ll back right off and then you can put away the dish with a quiet heart instead of the other. Pet the dog instead of pushing him aside to get at the laundry; pet the dog and then get the laundry. Don’t give it what it wants, because what it wants is to be in control, it’ll snap you around like a flag on a windy day. Your nerves will literally fray.

This is the type of emotional control that helps you get up and stay in your handstands, too, of course. Handstands and laundry. I should pay Steve double for his classes.

But today I forgot. You can ask Jack about that. He quietly took Jackson off and away to hit tennis balls because I spent the morning with no more breath in me at all, trying to push It back, because It wanted what It wanted and what it wanted was to shut me down. It put the fire in my heart right out, like a bucket of water hitting a birthday candle. It got what it wanted.

(But when that happens, sometimes there’s a solution:)

At one point while Alice and I were working, The Simpsons came up in conversation. (I have a wee app widget that feeds random Homer quotes to my MacBook dashboard, like “We’re going bowling. If we don’t come back, avenge our deaths,” and “Well, it’s 1 a.m. Better go home and spend some quality time with the kids.”) Alice admitted that during a certain point in her life it was really important for her to watch that show, and I confessed how I always wanted to watch the Simpsons but my Simpsons-watching always depended on which relationship I was in at the moment. (Dividing my old boyfriends into Simpsons watchers and non-Simpsons watchers is as valid way as any of reducing them to stereotypes, right?) The point being, if my boyfriend liked The Simpsons, I got to watch The Simpsons. If he didn’t, I had to ask the bartender to turn up the volume.

Why yes, I did have some trouble getting my other needs met, now that you ask.

This makes me realize that I haven’t not been in a relationship since the show began, in 1989. I know most of you were twelve then, but surely you’ll appreciate the fact that one of my ’90s boyfriends liked to watch The Simpsons with no pants on. Naturally, he encouraged me to do the same. He was a nice guy with some funny habits, and he’d get out a blanket for our laps — you know, for modesty’s sake, in case his roommate came home and saw us sitting on the couch in our undies. Even though his roommate was a nice guy, and they were very close. I think they might even still be roommates. I remember wanting to be real quiet if we were having sex when his roommate was home, but my boyfriend kind of had the attitude that he hoped his roommate would enjoy knowing we were having a good time and sort of get turned on by it. And part of me was all, Okay, wow, that’s tribal of you.* Plus, I had my own roommate to deal with, so it wasn’t like I could’ve suggested we leave and go over to my place, where my sexually awkward roommate would be staring into the gloom above his bed and everso politely listening to us as well. Of course, my roommate insisted we not have a TV at all. Otherwise, instead of listening to me and my boyfriend have sex WE COULD ALL HAVE BEEN WATCHING THE SIMPSONS.

*I’m great at rationalizing all sorts of questionable boyfriend behavior; having grown up with a lot of intimacy/insecurity/boundary problems, I spent years pretending that I was just fine with a lot of behavior that a self-respecting person shouldn’t be fine with AT ALL. I should say that the no-pants thing was an incredibly mild example of this, and fell more on the “fun thing to try” end of the spectrum than on the “will put you in the hospital” side.

I had kind of an adventure getting from California to New York!

Despite the fact that I couldn’t wait to actually BE in New York and writing with Alice, I’d been somewhat dreading the skyward application of movement that would result in the transferrence of my corporeal being from one coast to the next. I mean, AIRPORTS = SO MUCH WAITING and sitting and looking at people eat and also being afraid of their sneezes. And the spending of money on a ticket and an airport-priced bottle of water, MY GOD. But I rummaged around in my purse until found a bullet and then I bit down on it, and Thursday morning I boarded a commuter flight (you know, the little crashy ones!) to LAX, from which point I would launch myself Eastward.

In telling this tale I will spare you all but the most fascinating details, many of which involve a peculiar romance that’s blossoming between me and my Kindle.

ALSO, I APOLOGIZE FOR THE GROSS MISUSE OF CAPITAL LETTERS. BUT I WARN YOU THAT IT MAY CONTINUE.

I got to LAX, bought a $27 bottle of water, checked the departures screen to see what gate my next flight was leaving from (not posted yet), and sat down. I read. For two hours I read and sat and sat and read and periodically got up to check the departures board, which always said my flight was ON TIME but never assigned it a gate. About 30 minutes before flight time I finally looked at my boarding pass. THAT had a gate number on it! Hey! And that gate was a 20 minute walk from where I was.

Run, O.J., Run!

I have a trustworthy little voice in my head that I need to pay more attention to, but frankly that little voice naps an awful lot, and then it WAKES UP IN A PANIC and YELLS AT ME.

So I boarded and all was well. The flight wasn’t full so I had a whole row to myself! I was thinking about stretching out and taking a nap but then the flight attendant handed me a CHEESEBURGER. This had NEVER HAPPENED TO ME BEFORE and it was AWESOME. What a wonderful trip this is! I said to myself. I did not get all smug and go on to say, and I bet we’ll land in Newark early! Because I’m not, despite the opinion of some, a complete idiot. I may be a partial idiot, AS WE ALL ARE, but there are some areas in which I excel and one of them is not pretending that just because I feel lucky and comfortable at the moment is this state guaranteed to continue indefinitely.

And what happened next was that about an hour out of Los Angeles, a young woman several rows behind me fainted. Upright in her seat, which is second only to fainting in bed, for safety purposes.

We learned about the event after a flight attendant got on the P.A. and asked “Is there a health professional on board?” That was a thrill, believe me. Beverage service halted! Passengers stood! Necks were craned! Oxygen tanks passed briskly overhead!

I couldn’t see what was happening and frankly I felt like it was really none of my business. I went back to reading Autobiography of a Yogi. And eventually everything got quiet, they moved the beverage carts away, and I all but forgot about the Fainter until about an hour later when the captain announced that we were, as a group, going to drop her off in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We began our descent to a flyover state! I actually got kind of excited about that for a couple of reasons, one of which was that I’m from a flyover state, so I have Flyover State Pride, and another of which was Tulsa is where Sarah Brown’s parents live.

Tulsa from above looks like a suburb of suburban L.A., a manageable sprawl, big enough to get on the map but not so big that you can’t get your arms around it and give it a friendly squeeze.

Tweeting about Tulsa was extra fun because it got the few people from Oklahoma who follow me on Twitter all up in arms.

There wasn’t a lot of complaining in the cabin about our unexpected stop in the Central Time Zone, fortunately. Certainly I felt that if the Fainter were me, I’d want to get off the damn plane, already, and I’d feel terrible about inconveniencing a bunch of understanding, to a point, strangers. I think we all felt bad for the girl — who, now that I think of it, was being abandoned by the airlines in Tulsa, Oklahoma? — and mentally rearranged our schedules for arriving in Newark an hour later than planned.

Meanwhile, Sarah B. went so far as to Tweet that if I needed it she could find a place for me to stay in Tulsa. I offered to fake a heart attack if it meant I could stay in her old room, and she replied that the pink decor would probably give me a heart attack. I treasure the life-sustaining properties of almost all of my internal organs, so I put her well-meaning but deadly suggestion on hold because:

Pro tip for all future flight-disrupters: if you become ill in one of the back rows, you will be wheeled all the way up the aisle in a special airplane-aisle-sized wheelchair for your ROLL OF SHAME and everyone will want to get a good look at you, so a contrite/sick to your stomach facial expression helps the rest of us feel like our time isn’t being completely wasted.

After the Fainter and her family deplaned, the rest of us sat there wondering when we were going to take off again. Nearly thirty minutes elapsed until the captain came on the line and announced:

Some guy a dozen rows up from me bellowed “UNACCEPTABLE!” and I hope it made him feel better, it certainly didn’t shrink the distance between Houston, where the oxygen tanks were, and Tulsa, where we needed them to be. I thought about standing up and yelling, “MERCURY IS RETROGRADE! TRAVEL DELAYS ARE FORESEEABLE FOR THE NEXT THREE WEEKS!” But I didn’t because if you say stuff like that around certain people it doesn’t have the calming, reassuring effect you think it will.

So we all filed off the plane to spend the next four hours in the airport bar, which had been shut up tight until someone called the manager and told him to come back in to reopen it or 100+ completely sober New Yorkers and Angelenos would open it up for themselves.

I kind of wanted a beer, but I also wanted to find an outlet and recharge my phone, and so I happened to be in the waiting area when one of the ground crew made a quiet announcement over the politely-not-too-loud, it’s-Tulsa-and-we-have-good-manners P.A. system offering a voucher for a hotel and a flight out in the morning for those who didn’t want to stew in their own juices for the rest of the night, fly through the air with a frustrated, exhausted crew, and then try to get a taxi out of Newark at 3:00 a.m.

So me, some French guy, and a young couple who were on their way back from New Zealand and were so sleep-deprived and slap-happy that they’d grab their knees in mirth at the slightest provocation, we got our vouchers and slunk off to the dingiest little Radisson I’ve ever been so grateful to see.

A sudden and unexpected trip to a hotel bar in America’s Heartland had me reevaluating my wardrobe choices. When packing for this trip, and indeed for life itself, looking like a girly-girl isn’t always at the top of the list. So I showed up in the Radisson bar looking as I often do, like an extra in The Seventh Seal: cropped hair, monk’s cowl, carrying the devil’s own electronic book-reading machine:

Oklahoma, I’m used to inattentive strangers calling me “sir,” but I’m not used to waiters 15 years younger than me calling me “dear.”

Come here, Tulsa. Give me kiss.

Unfortunately, I had to stop making out with Tulsa and force myse
lf to sleep so I could make it back to the airport at 4:45 a.m. for the next direct flight to Newark.

Flight: UNEVENTFUL
Taxi into the city: WAITING
Wallet: EMPTIED
Apartment: WARM
Writing partner: PUNCTUAL AND INSPIRED

And now we work.

I assume everyone has already consumed their yearly allotment of butter, but in case you need something to push you into the 99th percentile, here’s a good way to pop open your fat pants. My mom typed up some of my favorite recipes and mailed them to me when I became a grownup, in those crazy years before computers, global warming, and teeth bleach. It was a time of nutritional wonderment, when mothers fed their babies jars of Gerber egg yolks GAH.

Seriously, though, these are really good, and they freeze pretty well, too.

Happy new year!

“Comedy is the most important thing in the world except for justice.” Sigourney Weaver

“The greatest sin is judgment without knowledge.” Kelsey Grammar

“Money is not going to make you happy. A new idea is what makes you happy.” Fifty Cent

“Sports teach you how to be quick. Injuries teach you how to slow down.” Yao Ming

“I wasn’t so interested in being paid. I wanted to be heard. That’s why I’m broke.” Ornette Coleman

“Psychology is as important as substance. If you treat people with respect, they’ll go our of their way to accommodate you. If you treat them in a patronizing way, they will go out of their way to make your life difficult.” Mohamed ElBaradei (director general, International Atomic Energy Agency)

“What makes for a good character is weakness and strength–that combination that we all have. It’s often missing from characters in badly crafted stories.” James Spader

“The key to milking a cow is you don’t actually pull your hand down; you move your fingers. You’ve got to press the milk out.” Katie Stam (Miss America)

“We have a very good law in Maine: When you catch a female, you carve a notch into the tail and throw it back. The industry has grown under that law. It proves if you take care of the female, she’ll do you good business.” George Johnson (lobsterman)

(The January Esquire has a bunch of those “What I’ve Learned” lists in it.)