I Never Say This Because I Do Not Occur

It is entirely possible that I am the only person on the planet who finds this funny, but someone translated the piece I wrote for Modern Love into Portugese. I translated it back with Google's help. Here's the result.

When Writers Strike

One thing we all learned from this weekend's New York Times is that when writers go on strike they still feel the need to write stuff, which means that the Sunday paper was filled with I'm-A-Starving-TV-Writer essays. I have mixed feelings about this strike. On the one hand, as a writer, I want the best for other writers. On the other hand, these are not coal miners who are being denied health care by the mining company, or people who are risking their lives daily to provide us with ...coal?... or grumpy northern English steelworkers who are watching their towns suffer at the hands of corporations while their youngest sons go to London to become ballerinas.

Instead, we've got pictures of Seth Myers and Tina Fey walking around in front of the NBC building, which only reminds us that, hey, those people work at the NBC building, one of the nicest buildings in New York, where you have to pass through maximum security just to get into the elevators, and when they're done with their insanely highly paid day jobs they probably just pop over to Bergdorfs to pick up a new cashmere scarf and patent leather gloves so they're not cold the next day on the picket line.

The fact is that when you decide to become a writer you pretty much agree to receive payment in non-monetary ways. Like looking lovingly at your article in a magazine, for which your hourly wage probably comes to something like -23 cents, or smiling at your book as you pass it in Barnes and Noble, the advance for which you spent long before the book even came out. I'm not saying this is right, and certainly writers deserve to be as ridiculously rich as producers or actors or those guys who design the opening credits or whatever else TV people do that makes them zillions of dollars. I'm just saying that it's hard to have sympathy for people who have jobs that most people would do for free, and also for which I would be a willing and able scab. In case anyone at the Daily Show wants to hire a few scab writers. I could totally do that job. I swear.

All Me, All The Time - Parenting Magazine Edition

I have an essay up on Babble about air travel with tiny irrational people (and yes, I am referring to the TSA officials).

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.

All Me All The Time - Newspaper Edition

Two years and three essays later, I've finally made it into the Modern Love column in the New York Times.

Last week the copyeditor/fact checker person from the Times called to inform me that the Times has only published the word "farts" once in their entire history, and it was the last name of a marathon runner. (And I thought I had a sort of annoying last name!) They therefore needed to change the word "farts" in my essay to "passes gas," which is a phrase I've probably never uttered in my life.

I pointed out that "farts" is a lot funnier than "passes gas" and they were all, yeah, but we're the Times. So that's how that ended. Also I apparently do not know the true meaning of the word "dilemma."

Either way, I'm thrilled to have made an appearance in the column - hope everyone enjoys it.

New Essay

My loss is your gain. Here's an unpublished/unsellable essay that I wrote about how my footwear changed when I had a baby.

Old Age Is Like A Semicolon

Forgive me while I take a small peek back at my embarassingly sci-fi-tinged teenaged angst, but I just want to say how sad I am that Kurt Vonnegut has died. I discovered him somewhere around tenth grade and spent most of the time I was supposed to be studying reading his novels. He made me want to be a writer, say important things, and be funny. My favorite Vonnegut quote in this piece: "When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon."