Weekend Update

Labor Day weekend is the best weekend of the year in New York. The city empties out and you can drive from Brooklyn to the Upper West Side in 25 minutes. Then you can park. Anywhere. It's tempting to just drive around parking all day long. Also you can let a toddler run across 81st Street yelling "See disonaurs! See disonaurs!" without having him smash into people or getting too many dirty looks.

Labor Day weekend is also usually my wedding anniversary. On Friday Steven and I celebrated 4 years of marriage by going out for a huge steak. The good news: still glad I married him. He makes me smile every day.

And... in other news, did you see the Times this weekend? Noticed the comments on the blog? Being published in the Times was an experience like no other. I walked out of the house in the morning to get the paper, saw all the papers lined up on everyone's front stoop up and down the street and realized that my words and my name were in every single one. Later in the day I passed a woman in the playground reading my essay.

The emails started trickling in on Saturday, when the piece went up online. By Sunday I was getting one every hour or so, and the comments started appearing on the blog. I'm going to leave them up because I think they offer a good sense of the type of feedback I've been getting on the piece. Also, they prove that there will never be peace in the Middle East (or anywhere else) because people in general are intolerant and nuts and want to tell everyone else how to live.

Sunday evening Steven and I went out for drinks with a friend of mine and her boyfriend who were passing through Park Slope. I told them about some of the hate mail I was getting and the boyfriend told me about a sportswriter he knew who he said got tons of hate mail all the time. So that's who gets hate mail: men who write about sports and women who write about motherhood. That sounds about right.