Quelle Horreur

It was bound to happen. After over 3 years of avoiding shared air space, "Bruno" returns, looking as smug and superfluous as ever.

Karl and I had decided to take Wednesday off and just be tourists for the day. We went to the National Zoo, did a little shopping, had a leisurely lunch at Open City, a place which normally has tons of people spilling out into the streets waiting for tables. The day was ours to claim!

After lunch, we decided to take one of those double-decker Hop On Hop Off buses that we always see careening down P Street in Georgetown. It just so happened, there was a stop right in front of Open City and the Chinese take-out restaurant just next door sold tickets. We had just missed a bus, so we waited at one of the restaurant's outdoor tables for the next one to swing by. After a few minutes relaxing in the sun, combined with the huge steak and cheese Stromboli that was now in his belly, Karl fell asleep. Which was a very good thing.

Because, all of a sudden, who comes strolling down the street in a shiny blue Argentina soccer shirt and silky running shorts? He himself. Bruno. I quickly alternated between making sure Karl's eyes were still closed and trying to figure out where to direct my gaze once he passed by. Because he was walking like he had all the time in the world, I had a moment to take a few deep breaths. I was already holding onto Karl's arm (which in my mind would tell Bruno - I'm still with the same guy, loser!) and was semi-facing a big sandwich board proclaiming the benefits of the Old Town Trolley versus the Hop On Hop Off bus. All of a sudden, this sandwich board became the most fascinating reading material (even though I had already read, at least 3 times, that Old Town Trolley employs only Americans - like xenophobia is a virtue!)

I just kept my gaze focused on the sign in front of me and didn't notice Bruno again until he had passed by. Karl (who had a Bruno sighting years ago when he picked me up at work for lunch and saw Bruno, eating his lunch al fresco, with a cloth napkin spread grandly across his lap. "Only an idiot like Bruno would think he was at liberty to take such an extended time away from his desk," he had noted), luckily, was still dozing.

Seeing Bruno again reminded me that he was not just a character in my book. Someone I could hold up for ridicule (my own as well) and examination on the silent page. He was still alive and breathing and still a menacing character in my off-the-page life. In just a short span of a few seconds, I had worm holed back to the days when Bruno still made me feel anxious and unloveable.

I was momentarily cheered, though. Just seeing him in his shorts at 3 PM on a weekday told me that he still wasn't gainfully employed (he was, um, "let go" from my company shortly after I resigned). But then I thought, maybe he was thinking the same thing about seeing me in my shorts at 3 PM on a weekday. And seeing my husband, too. "What a couple of Spanish-word-for-losers," he might have clucked to himself. "Both of them without jobs."

But that was just a fleeting thought. Because I'm guessing he's still the same self-satisfied, out-of-touch jerk he was 3 years ago when I last shared air space with him, in an office, surrounded by his superiors, explaining (without much coherency) why he found it so difficult to work with me.

I was never part of the problem, you see. It was the work that got in his way of his working. But now, judging by his get up, he has all the time in the world to work that problem out.

In honor of the upcoming PAPERBACK release...

I've been pulling together some photos to send to the producer of Better TV, which will be used as part of my segment when I appear on the show, gulp, July 27th. (So please check their website for local times and listings!) She asked for any pictures that showed me carrying out my experiment with women's magazines.

Karl and I spent Friday night going over what resulted in the July chapter - CAMPING! Below are 2 photos from the trip we took to the Laguna Seca Racetrack a few years ago. I still shudder to think about those Porta-Johns.

Even though it looks like I'm having a blast, do not be fooled by my mugging for the camera.

Here's how that section of the book opens:

"The campgrounds turned out to be a fire hazard of brown brush, clouds of perpetually settling dust, and a row of four tilted Porta-Johns that I knew, upon entering, would turn me into a Johnny Knoxville skit where I'd tumble end over end until I cam to a soggy landing, at which point the door would fly open and there I'd be, with my nylon pants around my knees, a camping spectacular for all to see."





So above, you can see the layout of our campsite. We are eating on someone's sleeping bag mat. Karl is the one with the knit cap on his head and I look like I'm enjoying the hell out of my veggie kabob. "Amy" is already drunk and being an idiot. The guy next to her is Karl's best friend Rob, who was so thrilled to be away from his wife and 3 toddlers for a long weekend, he would put up with anything that came his way. Including drunks.



I don't know where I got those goggles from. You can see how tightly the tents were packed together - and how, instead of RVs, people drove to the site on motorcycles. This thumbs up is all for show. I was not too happy with the outdoor life.

Stay tuned for more photos....next, comes evidence from cooking month!

The Look of Love

Even though my book chronicles the year I spent following the advice found in women's magazines, anyone who has read it (and if you have not, please do!) will tell you the book is really a love story. Starring Karl.

And as the book is about to relaunch in paperback (gulp, July 28th), I've been looking back on the year since its release and taking a bunch of strolls down memory lane. This of course will help me for the next round of publicity (I haven't looked at my index card talking points in a while). But these little trips are also making me all warm and fuzzy, just thinking about how lucky I was to meet someone like Karl when I was so out of control. And lucky too, that he saw something stable and loving in me when I most certainly did not.

So I was already in this mushy state when my friend Sabrina sent me some old photos, taken in the first few months of Karl's and my courtship. We were in Positano, Italy, at our friends' wedding and I absolutely remember thinking that I had never been happier in my life. Never ever. And even though I think back on that trip now and realize that it marked the course of my future with Karl, I didn't realize that anyone had captured any of this pure joy on film.

But here it is and it is not for the faint of heart.

Just to reiterate

Like I said in my last post - it's hard out there for a pimp. I was reminded of this lesson today, along with my stupidity, in approaching an editor at a major newspaper in an attempt to woo her into writing about me and the book.

In an effort to sound self-deprecating and funny (when in actuality, I was trying to come up with an excuse for why I was contacting this editor directly, an approach which always strikes me as desperate and/or aggressive and always makes me feel a bit ashamed) I made a joke about having to do all this publicity work myself since my publicist was already off working on the next big book.

Of course, my intention was just to be poke fun at myself and the whole business of marketing and promotion. Which is why I then forwarded the email I sent to this editor to my publicist, who read my attempt at humor and saw nothing amusing about it. To put it mildly, she was pissed and I don't blame her.

This is the kind of idiotic oversight that will have me up all night. I'm surprised I haven't cried yet. That's usually my go-to reaction. But when my agent called to tell me how my email had made the rounds at the publisher, I managed to keep it together. And immediately emailed a sincere mea culpa to my publicist.

This almost-year since the hardcover publication has taught me so much. But obviously, I still have an awful lot to learn.

Maybe this is a mistake...

Since it's hard out there for a publishing pimp, in lieu of wearing a sandwich board all over DC (which, actually, would be a brilliantly stupid marketing campaign), I have decided that, starting tomorrow, I will be Tweeting an entire chapter of my book, which will be out in paperback July 28th. I don't think I'll make it through the whole chapter with just 140 characters a pop, but at least I can get through all the juicy stuff.

Please follow along!

Now that's what I call writing

I think most writers would agree: We think we're brilliant to the proportion we think we're crap. I mean, some days I write a sentence and feel like I've found the lost note. (BTW, do any of you out there know this story? I vaguely remember hearing this fairy tale as a kid, about a pianist who one day sat down and played the most beautiful note - or chord, I guess - in the world. And then promptly forgot how he did it, never to play it again but never giving up trying to recreate it.) Other days, like today, for example, I spend an hour tangling with the opening of a new essay and think: Why bother?

There are writers out there composing magical notes all over the page. Junot Diaz, for example. Here's a bit from his magnificent The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. "But that's not what I wanted to tell you. It's about that crazy feeling that started this whole mess, the bruja feeling that comes singing out of my bones, that takes hold of me the way blood seizes cotton." GORGEOUS.

I have met another writer with this same power over words. Her name is Susan McCallum Smith and she wrote a book of delicate, funny, and tenderly told short stories called Slipping the Moorings that just made me weep. It's put out by Entasis Press (with the fabulous Ed Perlman at the helm) and if you ever ever ever get the chance to hear Susan read from her book, her lyrical Scotish accent makes you just want to crawl into the page and disappear into her world.

It's way better than a Saturday night at the movies. (Although, The Hangover does look like a pretty good runner-up to a trip to the moors of Scotland.)