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.

In a wonderful coincidence, I decided to try to revive Fussy's long-neglected Reading page and Sony offered to help out by letting me give away one of their Pocket Readers. Go see!

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 myself 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.)

The biggest perk I've earned for writing a few blog posts for PBS is that it's given me the chance to pester the staff for favors. I am so grateful to Jeannine Harvey in particular for making this happen:



It's an autographed photo of Margaret Warner, as you can see, that arrived just in time to be an early Christmas present for Jack. Jack loves Margaret. Whenever the NewsHour comes on, Jack heaves a small, lovesick sigh and says, "Oh, Margaret, what a cunning stick pin you have in your lapel tonight," or he asks me, "Do you like Margaret better in navy or taupe?" I realize I can't compete with a woman reporting from Kandahar in a flak jacket, and I've come to terms with that.

I'm happy for Meredith Baxter. She's in gay love with a contractor! I bet her rain gutters look fantastic. I wonder if she's reading the comments about her over at the Daily News? I love how the illiterate asses always throw in first, and then the vultures swoop in and rip them apart, and then the maggots swarm around for awhile, and then you get a couple of tortoises on the side of the road making smart remarks about the mess:

sgt_majorette
12:18:44 PM Dec 2, 2009

Oh my goodness. I am so shocked. What is this world coming to. Think of the children. Family values. America. What about the troops. Can I go back to watching SpongeBob now?

Yankeeman6969
1:05:02 PM Dec 2, 2009

Majorette, SpongeBob and Patrick are gay together. Squidward is gay also. And Sandy the Squirrel is a big-time rug- (or is it seaweed)-muncher. Mrs. Puff and Pearl are getting it on. The only one on that show who's not gay is Mr. Krabs, who is in love only with money...LOL! In all serious, David Birney must love that his time was wasted with someone who wasn't even interested in his gender. At least they got 2 kids out of it.

Yankeeman6969
1:06:13 PM Dec 2, 2009
To clarify, I was addressing Majorette, not saying that she was gay with SpongeBob and Patrick. There should've been a colon after her name, not a comma.

Yesterday I took Jackson to get an ice cream cone after school. We pulled into Fosters Freeze and were unbuckling ourselves and whatnot when I glanced into the rear view mirror and saw a swarm of middle schoolers pouring out the door. Then two girls started beating the crap out of each other. I told Jackson to stay in the car, and we turned around and watched these fourteen-year-old girls yanking the shit out of each other's hair and trying to connect with some fists, but mostly just spinning around in a wobbly circle and tearing off each other's jackets. A dozen other kids stood by shouting and seeming sort of equally giddy and horrified.

So I was sitting there in my car, and I was of two minds. One mind said: Stay out of it. You don't know these kids, it's none of your business. The other mind said: You're a GROWNUP, get out there and break it up.

The moment I decided to get out of the car and see what I could do to abate the damage, a Fosters Freeze counter guy came out the door, the tall one. He had just the verge of a smirk on his face as he circled the girls, who were in a sort of shrieky scrum now, and he chose the smaller of the two and he wrapped his arms around her torso and lifted her up, then he turned 180° and placed her back down on the blacktop, whereupon her best friend handed her her backpack and they both climbed into a Ford Explorer that'd been sitting there with her mom (I'm assuming) waiting for her with the engine running. (The other fighter vanished.) There was another SUV sitting in the space next to the Explorer so the mom couldn't see what was going on on the other side of it, her daughter losing chunks of hair and dignity. I couldn't see the mom's face, I just saw her posture go all rigid and WTF?

On the way home in the car, Jackson and I talked about what we'd seen, and I told him about being unsure of what I should have done. "I could have stopped it," he said in that ridiculously confident way third graders who've played a lot of video games have. Then we got home and he took a two-hour nap for some reason? The end.