Wouldn't it Be Nice

I owed you a blog yesterday. I owe you a blog today. I'm just a little tapped out in the bloggish way this week. Please accept my apologies and know that I'll be back with you shortly.

Come Fly with Me

I missed a week, and I am so sorry. Please believe me when I say my life got incredibly busy; I barely had time to do my reading at Chevalier Books (I think everyone had a lovely time and thanks to those who came out) and repeatedly put food in front of my daughter. Because, last week, the entire family was occupied with only one job: we had to find the source of the tiny flying bugs.

Last Sunday, Consort and I walked into the kitchen and quickly noticed we weren’t alone. There were about twenty teensy flying thingies, smaller than a freckle, moving purposefully around the kitchen. I said something helpful like, “Auck!” because I always try to raise the level of discourse. Consort said, “Oh, we’ve got some kind of overripe fruit around here.” We searched the kitchen and found no fruit, overripe or otherwise. I stood there, alternately disgusted by the little flying dealies and embarrassed about what no fruit in the house said about my mothering abilities. Consort squinted at the bugs and noted, “They’re eating something. They won’t leave until we get rid of it.”

Oh, it is fun to spend a Sunday night tearing apart kitchen cabinets looking for a half-opened bag which is serving as a Soup Plantation for a lower life form. It’s less fun when you don’t find it. The bugs continued to chat among themselves over the sink. We decided something in the sink was pleasing them, so we scrubbed the sink.

They remained. We went to bed.

The next night, we (actually, Consort) decided it was a garbage disposal thing, so he cleaned out the disposal.

They drifted away for a few minutes during the noisier aspects of garbage-disposal cleaning, but then hurried back to their beloved spot hovering over the sink.

The next night, we cleaned the entire kitchen. First, I cleaned it with my non-toxic chemicals; then Consort cleaned it with the stuff he thinks actually works. I think one of the bugs might have sneezed, but they certainly didn’t go anywhere.

The next night, there were only a few over the sink, looking not unlike those sad hopeful men at a bar at 1:45am.

[Or so I've been told.]

We rejoiced in having bested the bugs or outlived them. I walked into my bathroom and beheld my enemies being showy over bathroom sink. I called for Consort; we cleaned the bathroom. If it weren’t for one of the plagues of Egypt staking a claim on my sinks, the house would look wonderful.

For such small bugs, they certainly ran the show. Friday night, Consort and Daughter carved the pumpkins. I didn’t carve because I needed to obsessively wipe down any surface which might have been contaminated by flying-dealie-exciting pumpkin goo. This was adorable and delusional of me, because our flying dealies were, while disgusting, excellent houseguests, never giving us a single hint they needed food of any kind. No, they just liked our sinks.

This week, it was socially acceptable around here to walk away from someone who was speaking if you thought you saw the dealies heading toward some non-sink place, which might give us a sense of what was keeping them around. Patient as Javert, one of us would tiptoe after the bug. After the bug-tracker would come the other adult in the house whispering suggestions and ill-founded theories and then Daughter, always eager to watch adults lose their minds. Behind Daughter would come the dog, who likes to include himself in family activities, and then the two kittens, possibly thinking this was some Parade to Kitty Stars. The only one missing was Lupac, who I sensed viewed our hunting skills the way a Marine in Afghanistan views a mall-cop. The family would quickly be disappointed, as the bug would bumble its way back to the herd for a satisfying evening of idling in space over the sink.

A week after it began, when I was starting to imagine incorporating them into Christmas decorations, Consort walked out of the bathroom carrying bug spray. It smelled terrible; he looked pleased.

“I just remembered,” he said, putting the bug spray away, “that my house in Beverly Glen got these once, and they were actually living down the sink drain.”

I glanced into the bathroom and noted the sink didn’t have its own cumulous cloud. “Are you going to do the kitchen as well?” I asked and Consort said, “Let’s see if this works. I’d rather not bug-spray our kitchen sink.”

Oh, I hadn’t thought of that. In case anyone ever wondered what I saw in Consort, he’s very smart, he’s very funny, he’s very kind and he might keep me from accidentally killing myself.

The kitchen sink became a non-issue anyway, because it’s been three days now and the small flying dealies are as gone as they were once ubiquitous. I don’t know why the goulash of shaving foam, toothpaste and mouthwash flecks in our sink pleased them but whatever afterlife Consort banished them to, I can only hope it’s being served.

Public Sighting

Sunday, November 1st, I'll be reading at Chevalier Books in Larchmont Village here in Los Angeles at 11:00. It's a charming neighborhood, it's an adorable bookstore, and they have a Farmer's Market up the block on Sunday mornings. You know, in case my presence alone wasn't enough to motivate you to get out of bed. Also, there's a very real possibility I'll say something inappropriate. History has shown this to be true.

Hope to see you there.

Under My Thumb

First, I’d like to thank everyone who gave me their code phrases which makes their loves ones put on lead-lined underwear. It’s amazing what a bounteous language English can be when you want to scare the hell out of someone. Now, on to my life or, as Consort summed it up, “Oh, look. Kittens.”

Yes, kittens. I’ve been told by certain caring readers (Actually, Consort) that it’s a little cat-centric around here and for this I apologize to anyone who doesn’t check in at www.icanhascheezburger.com four times a day. If you’re not a felinophile, come back next week, I’ll try to have run into something or done something socially questionable by then.

Three weeks ago, a quick email request went out from the animal-rescue group with which I work. Someone had dumped seven kittens at our doorstep and the cages were full; could people take cats? I quickly conferred with the unbelievably patient Consort and offered to take two.

I went in and saw the temporary pen with the kittens in it. Some litters are affectionate, some are playful; this litter could be declared fratricidal. If you’ve ever come across cage-fighting on one of the higher cable channels, you’ve seen this litter. Sports drinks are missing a valuable sponsorship opportunity. I pointed to a rolling ball of screaming fur and said, “We’ll take that one and another one.”

The rolling ball was uncoiled and it turned out to be two kittens. The other volunteer held them arms-length apart. They made mean eyes at each other. I said feebly, “Should we get two who hate each other less?” and the volunteer laughed. “These two like each other. Look at the runt,” she said, pointing into the pen. One kitten, no longer than my thumb, was riding around on the head of the biggest kitten, trying to lance her eyeballs. Well, at least they were healthy and attractive.

Daughter named one Anne and the other Diana, because she’s reading Anne of Green Gables. My suggestion of North Korea and South Korea was politely overridden. As it turned out, the kittens are cloyingly affectionate to anything which isn’t another kitten from their litter. They catch my eye, they purr. Daughter talks to them and they knead and bat their lashes. The dog gazes at them neutrally and they practically cavort. And then we all leave the room and they notice there’s something else in the cage and then the beatings commence. Later, I sneak into the laundry room and find them asleep across one another, sleeping deeply, a baby tooth still sunk into an abdomen, a nail a millimeter away from a jugular.

After a couple of weeks, I decided that maybe the reason they kept trying to kill one another was they were stuck in a smallish cage together and I declared the entire laundry room their domain. This certainly improved their mood, because it gave them many more places to hide behind and wait for the other one to walk by. Whatever the cat versions of “Ha-HA! We meet again!” and “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die” are, I’ve heard them an average of sixteen times a day. But they seem pleased. And the laundry room’s floor is very nearly perfect for the countless ankle-wrenching little plastic toys they love to chase.

And then Lupac comes in and they are riveted. For the first week, I would hustle Lupac from the back door to the kitchen, covering her like a PR flack assuring reporters that Ms. Shapurr would love to talk to them if only she weren’t running late for her appointment with stinky wet food. After a couple of weeks, I grew tired of writing out her press releases and started letting her go rogue. Lupac would come in from the outside, leap on to the dryer and eat her dinner. Anne and Diana would sit on the floor, watching her so closely and with such absorption they’d even stop trying to disembowel one another. It occurred to me that the kittens, without ever having seen her work, instinctively knew Lupac was the Real Deal. She carried on her fur a whiff of the outdoors, of things barely conceivable to the indoor cat, a life of excess and danger and dark pleasures. In sum, Lupac is Keith Richards to the kittens. She’s a cigarette dangling from her lips and a skull ring away from starring in the next “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie.

For several days, they were respectful; she ignored them. But, as all Westerns have taught us, eventually someone will come gunning for the big guy. Two nights ago Lupac, having finished her wet food, jumped down on to the floor and started to leave. Anne, the braver or possibly more stupid of the kittens, snuck up behind Lupac and placed her paw on Lupac’s tail.

The next few seconds passed as a series of glances. First, Anne looked to Diana, Diana looked to Anne. “Are you actually touching her tail?” “I am totally touching her tail.” “I’m so impressed that I almost don’t want to kill you right now.”

Then, I looked at Anne and thought, “You aren’t that dumb. Krill isn’t that dumb. Take your paw off her tail, run for someplace small and pray to whatever God takes your calls that she’s doesn’t eat you.” Anne looked at me in triumph. “I’m the boss of her!”

Finally, I looked at Lupac, who was already looking steadily at me. “Please,” I implored her with my eyes, “don’t eat her. She’s very young, it would be disturbing for me to watch and I think she’s nearly all gristle.” Lupac looked at me, meaningfully and silently and then, never looking at Anne, pulled her tail out from under the kitten’s paw, swung past her, walked to the kittens’ food bowl, ate their wet food, mumbled something unintelligible under her breath and walked towards the door. At the door, she took a second to whack one of the baby’s toys backwards, which hit Anne between the eyes. The kittens stayed frozen in awe for at least a minute.

I suspect this is just how Keith would have handled it.

Keep Talking

Daughter observed last night, "Mom, when you start a sentence with the word 'Candidly,' it's not going to end well for me."

This proves two things. My daughter is very observant and I have a limited vocabulary. So, I ask you, what's the word or phrase in your life which alerts everyone near you to duck and cover?

And the Tree Was Happy

When a friend was recently thrown a baby shower for her first child, a boy, I got a little thrill of anticipation about buying a baby present. It had been a while since my last shower, since my friends are more in the “Shout at husband until he gets a vasectomy” phase than the “Ooh, I hope the stick shows two lines!” phase. Her family is extended and squealingly eager for this child, so I guessed there was nothing clothes-wise I could buy they hadn’t already bought in triplicate with a matching Burberry parka.

I went to a children’s bookstore, in search of inspiration. Something classic? Something new and fun? I went to Vroman’s, one of the few rest stops in the relentless Angeleno race to the intellectual bottom. The saleswoman in the children’s section showed me the wealth of toddler books geared towards boys; they were about trucks, or dinosaurs, or dinosaurs that were happiest driving trucks. I dithered, because it was possible this baby would be the only boy born this year who didn’t quickly show a preference for things which are loud and large. If he turned out to be the kind of boy who liked noticing the use of Helvetica fonts in advertising, my presents would just clutter their house and annoy the baby. Classics? I flipped through Beatrix Potter, Eric Carle, the oeuvre of Dr. Suess. All seemed possible. Then the saleswoman held up a green book and said, “How about this?”

I expostulated loudly “Oh God, no.” Then, realizing my shouting, blaspheming and pointing in horror in the children’s department of a century-old bookstore probably didn’t raise the bar socially, I moderated my tone, lowered my shaking index finger, and said in a quavering tone, “I don’t do ‘The Giving Tree.’ Ever.”

I’m sure you’ve read it. I know you’ve read it. I’m going to cover the content briefly for those people reading this very far away (Waving “Hi!” to Dubai and Turkmenistan). The boy is friends with a tree. Friends, in this case, means that he climbs the tree, eats her apple, sleeps in her shade. Then, he grows up, and the tree is lonely. He comes back; the tree longs for his company, but he needs money. The tree offers apples for the young man to sell, which he takes. When he comes back, he is a man, too busy to play with the tree, only interested in making a house for his wife and family. The tree offers branches for house-building, which the man hacks off. Years later, when he comes back, he denies the wish of the tree to play, asking instead for a boat. The tree suggests he cut the tree trunk down, hollow it out, make a boat. “And then,” the tree says, “you will be happy.” He hacks, he sails, tree starts life over a stump. Surely, you Azerbaijanis reading this are thinking, he’s done with abusing this tree’s good nature? Oh, no. Because much later the man comes back, old and feeble. The tree apologizes for not having apples, or branches, or a trunk he can use (And whose fault is that?), but the man explains that he’s so very old that all he wants in a place to sit. Joyfully, the tree offers the stump, all it has left, and the old man sits on it and they are very happy.

Oh, did I mention the tree is identified as female? That even those people who haven’t taken Women’s Studies classes can pick out the underlying theme where the female character gives and gives and gives, diminishing herself in the process, so the male character can heedlessly get everything he needs or believes he needs? That what is presented as a happy ending is the idea of a very old man’s butt plopped down on the one thing in his life who wanted nothing more than to encourage and support him? If I grant you that love is about giving without expectation of reciprocity, can we agree that reading a book to children which exalts selfishness on one hand and masochism on the other is some seriously broken logic? And who wants to guess that most boys having this read to them identify with the one who gets stuff as opposed to the one who endlessly gives?

And yes, I’m sure some kids absolutely love this book. I’d love a book too if it told me that love means getting whatever I want, whenever I want, from something which doesn’t have muscles to make a frowny face at me. Nearly every parent I know with a child between three and...well, teens is trying impress upon them that they are loved, but that still doesn’t mean they get everything they want. This classic and well-loved book is all too pleased to tell them otherwise.

For what it’s worth, Shel Silverstein’s bald head/big beard look bothered me as well. It was like that game we played as kids with the magnet filings you could move around and create hairdos. In sum, I find Mr. Silverstein icky, which I have no problem saying because I’m the only one who does so and besides, Mr. Silverstein and his weird facial hair made a great deal more money than I did last year. But his popularity and tax returns notwithstanding, I grabbed a couple of suitable-for-gnawing books on Amazonian animals and later a CD of Gwendolyn and the Good Time Gang music for the new arrival. Maybe the music is annoying after a year or so, but at least Gwendolyn calls the Selfish Shellfish on his behavior; she’s not doing squat to enable his bad behavior.

Blog Book Tour: A Book in Hand

A Book in Hand asked and I answered. It's a blast from the past! And she's having a giveaway!

Lydia oh Lydia, Say Have You Met Lydia

I’ve grown out of adolescence. I no longer think every single person on the planet is looking at me and snickering at something weird I just did. In fact, I’m pretty certain that on most days no one notices me at all. However, if on the off chance that you were driving down Ventura Boulevard last month and thought, “Say isn’t that Quinn Cummings leaving her young daughter alone at a tattoo parlor and driving off?” then I need to explain.

It was for health reasons.

If I had to break down my conversations with Daughter for the last ten months, thirty percent would be “Just five more minutes of reading and then I swear I’ll turn off the light and go to bed without a peep, I promise” and thirty percent would be “Math? Again? But I did math last week!” and thirty percent would be “When can I get my ears pierced?” The other ten percent is sneering at squash. I wasn’t all that excited about her getting her ears pierced, at least partially because newly-pierced ears, what with the cleaning and the turning and the monitoring, are kind of like a pet; a pet which, if ignored, gets crusty and gross. I wasn’t in the mood for a new pet. But she finished wearing her palate-expander and had taken excellent care of it, not losing it even once, and she was a trooper when it came to book publicity, melting into her room when I needed to do phone interviews and finding non-Mom-pestering hobbies when I swam through the Quinn Cummings Seemingly Endless Blog Book Tour. Grudgingly, I admitted she had earned those ear-holes.

So, last month, she had an appointment with our dermatologist anyway, I thought “Piercing, done in a hygienic environment!” and I exclaimed grandly to the kid, “Today, the doctor shall pierce your ears!” and she squealed “And we can show Daddy when he gets home from New York tonight!” and I smiled and she smiled and I basked in what a good mother I was.

“Oh, no. We don’t pierce ears,” the dermatologist said briskly, “that’s aesthetic.” Foolish Quinn, thinking a place with big ads in the waiting room extolling the virtues of freezing my face with botulism had an interest in aesthetics for profit. Daughter looked at me as we walked to the car, worried. “We’ll find somebody to pierce your ears,” I said in a soothing tone, “very soon.”
She knows that “Very soon.” It means “This just got put on a list only slightly shorter than the Mahabharata and it won’t get done before you’re worried about the calcium level in your bones.” She keened “But I want to show my pierced ears to Daddy tonight!”

Guilt poked me in the ribs. Along with everything else which was going on, Consort had been spending every other week traveling for work and she missed her father dreadfully. But, again, she’d been a real brick about it. If anyone deserved voluntary puncture wounds, it was my kid. I squared my shoulders and swore, “You will have pierced ears before nightfall!” I may have even pointed towards the sky with my index finger, such was my determination.

We left the doctor’s office and I stopped in the first jewelry store we saw, thinking someone in there would know about piercing options. Daughter admired the shiny things, happily holding the earrings up against her earlobes as the owner and I talked. Yes, she said, I could take the kid to the mall and get her ears pierced at one of the stands, but this woman couldn’t recommend it. She told me several Grand Guignol stories about poorly-cleaned plastic piercing guns which can’t be autoclaved, epic infections and asymmetrical, ragged holes which required stitching closed and repiercing. “I tell everyone to go to a tattoo parlor for piercings. It’s cleaner.” I prefer my rites of passage without blood-borne pathogens, so I thanked her sincerely and we headed off.

I don’t know what your family does on a Friday in August, but my family likes to drive through Hollywood, dashing in and out of tattoo parlors. Had I felt a need to get the Virgin of Guadalupe inked on my forearm, we could have been done before tea-time, but I came to discover that in every tattoo parlor, there was exactly one piercing guy and he was a night-owl. Not one of them was expected in before seven that evening. Consort was due home at six. We were both hot and exhausted; Daughter was near tears. “Sweetheart,” I said as we got back into the car for the thirtieth time, “we just might not be able to do this today.”

I steeled myself for the inevitable whine, preparing my unbearably tedious lecture of the importance of learning to wait for the things you want in life. Instead, she said softly, “It’s okay. I know you tried your best. I’ll get them...very soon.”

Which, of course, sent me into spasms of sorrow and resolve. I can’t give Daughter a back yard large enough for a pony, I can’t give her summer vacations in our second home in Maine but by God I can give her newly painful earlobes! We drove over the hill, into the San Fernando Valley, because they either had piercers who were early birds or we were going to Big Sugar and eating our sorrow.

As hot as Hollywood had been, the Valley was ten degrees hotter. Getting in and out of the car at various parlors became an exercise in watching my toenail polish melt. Finally, we drove up to one place which had the requisite flames and skulls painted on the window and a few shirtless and scrolled young men hanging around the door. There was no place to park. I said to Daughter, “Okay, we both know they aren’t going to have a piercing guy working right now, but you go in, ask them. I’ll wait here in the driveway.”

She got out of the car, dashed in, and dashed out again a second later, beaming and giving me a thumbs-up. I waved to her to get back in the car, but she had already darted back into the tattoo parlor. Fine, I thought, I’ll just park on Ventura which will take no more than a second, because there’s always parking on Ventura. And it should have taken no more than a second, were this storefront on any other block in the seventeen miles of Ventura. But this block, and the block next to it, was completely full; I had to park two blocks away from the tattoo parlor where my nine year-old daughter and her new friends waited for me. I sprinted in hundred-degree heat, my flip-flops sticking with each step. Finally, I got to the parlor; Daughter was sitting in the piercing chair, paging through a motorcycle magazine. She pointed to the girl straddling a hog and said, “Can I get those shorts?” Without looking, I said “No” and said to the owner, “I’m with her.” The owner said mildly, “Yeah, we wondered about you.”

So many people have.

Once I stopped gasping for air and determined no one had touched my daughter inappropriately, I couldn’t have been happier with the process. The piercer, who I believe was called Lemur, had a sparklingly-clean station; his tools were all metal and came in their own bags, fresh from the autoclaver. Lemur and Daughter discussed where exactly she wanted the holes; if she planned on getting multiple piercings later on, or those larger plugs, he’d account for that. She and I looked at each other with wide eyes. I didn’t exactly see this child of mine -- the one in walking shorts and a polo shirt with a crab embroidered on it—going for the earlobe plug anytime soon, but I appreciated Lemur’s thoroughness.

The actual piercings were quick and, according to Daughter, more weird than painful. He put in tiny hoops; I won’t tell you what part of the body Lemur usually pierces with them. Daughter stared in the mirror at herself in fascination while I paid. I smoothed her hair, noticing her head now clears my shoulders. “Sorry about leaving you here by yourself,” I whispered in her ear. She shrugged. “You always come back.” I looked at the clock. “Speaking of coming back, I think we need to get to the airport, don’t you?”

She grinned and we headed into the convection oven that is the San Fernando Valley, pierced and pleased.

I am the Eggman

I conceived an idea. Like most conceptions, it began with an egg. This egg was with a bunch of its friends at a gas station.

“Say,” I thought, “you, Quinn, would never eat a jar-egg. You should eat a jar-egg.”

If you’ve ever been in a dusty bar on an abandoned highway, you’ve seen jar-eggs. If you’ve been in a gas-station in an unincorporated part of your city, you’ve seen jar-eggs. They are hard-boiled eggs, bobbing around in an unwholesome way in a cloudy vat of brine. Sometimes there’s a lid on the jar, but as often as not the lid is rakishly tipped to the side, a lid-beret welcoming all insects, some of whom lie dead on the top egg. A jar of eggs lets you know you can get a Quik-Pik Lotto ticket at this place and that hope snuck out the back door without paying the check many years ago. I had never known a single person to eat a jar-egg. True, I had never heard of a person dying of eating a jar-egg, but that might be because no one had ever eaten one. Or, the kind of person who ate a jar-egg tended to die down next to the river and wasn’t found until spring.

But here’s the thing; I spend what sometimes feels like all my waking hours telling my daughter to be brave about trying new foods and the reality is that I haven’t eaten a single new food in the last decade. A woman who is nearly 70% bean-and-cheese burrito by volume isn’t in the position to convince her daughter to try kale. I suspect a woman who has eaten a jar-egg will have a knowing glint in her eye that her daughter cannot ignore. She might also have an IV tube in her arm, but that was a risk I was willing to take, if it meant the kid would eat another vegetable besides broccoli and green beans.

I denied myself those particular gas station jar-eggs, but the idea kept floating around, as unattractive and compelling as the actual eggs. I called my friend Mary, because she eats nearly everything and what she doesn’t eat, she knows someone who does. Without much fanfare, I suggested I might, possibly, eat a jar-egg. She gasped.

“I have never known anyone who ate a jar-egg.”

This was worrisome.

“Do you think it could kill me?” I asked.

She thought. “No…I-well, it probably doesn’t have anything in it that could kill you…the brine should help.”

We sat in silence, each contemplating how much brine could be reasonably expected to do.

“Ooh,” Mary said suddenly, “If you’re going to do it, you know where you have to get the jar-egg? Phillipe’s, downtown. I’ve been going there since I was a baby, my parents went there since they were kids, and none of us have ever seen someone eat a Phillipe’s jar-egg. The brine is purple.”

And here I thought it only came in a cloudy and unsightly green.

“Do we know why it’s purple?”

“Beets, I guess.”

Oh, this was getting good. I despise beets in any form. Canned, baked, precious little heirloom ones on a fancy salad, they all taste like iron filings to me. I’d sooner lick a handrail; same flavor and you’re done faster. But beets are very good for you and I’ve always felt badly that I hadn’t given them more of a chance, when I wasn’t shooing them off to the corner of my plate. I’d eat a jar-egg and it would taste in some way of beets and even if I never did another brave thing in my life, I’d have that. If Daughter flinches at the sight of a Brussels sprout, I can lean over to her and say knowingly, “At least it’s not marinated in beets.”

I invited friends to come watch me eat the Phillipe’s jar-egg, both for the support and for the corroboration. If I was going to eat a jar-egg, I wanted to make sure someone could stand beside me in years to come and say, “Yes, she indeed ate a jar-egg,” because I suspected I wasn’t doing it again. Or maybe I was entering a new phase in my life, the jar-egg-eating phase, I mused as I called accomplices. Maybe I’d take to driving all over the West Coast, comparing brine-styles. Perhaps my friends would chuckle when I wasn’t around and say things like “That Quinn and her eggs.” Maybe this was just the beginning of finding out the world had endless treats and surprises and some of them lived in jars filled with unhealthy-looking fluid. Perhaps I shouldn’t have bandied the phrase “Unhealthy-looking fluid” around when inviting my friends, because no one wanted to go. Couldn’t take the kid, because she’d never eat outside the Frito-Lay food group if I started gagging and clutching at my throat. As with being born and dying, I was to eat my jar-egg alone.

It was lunchtime; the lines at Phillipe’s were long but efficient, a function of it being the restaurant of choice for employees at City Hall and the courts. I had a few minutes to contemplate the purple jars at the head of each line. No one else was acknowledging them. I dithered about my order. Should I just order an egg, gazing directly at the counterwoman, reveling in my own iconoclastic jar-egg-ness, letting my egg freak-flag fly? That seemed a little extreme. Maybe I should order a whole lunch, just letting the egg participate. But then I’d always have the chance to cover whatever egg-flavor there was in the rest of my lunch, winning on technical points but knowing forever that I hadn’t really fully experienced the jar-egg.

Or maybe I should just get a sandwich and let the jar-egg remain mythic and unknown, the Yeti of side-dishes.

I got to the front and said to the fiftyish counterwoman, “A cheese sandwich, a Diet Coke and…an egg.” This felt like buying an emery board and a road map to make the porn magazine look less unseemly.

She squinted. “An egg-salad sandwich?”

Oh, she was going to make me beg for it. “No, I…want a egg. From the jar.” I jerked my thumb towards the jar. The eggs bobbed, happy to be noticed. The counterwoman grabbed a square of wax-paper and fished out an egg; it was sort of a light bluish gray, the color I associate with people who have drowned. I noticed the counterwoman next to mine stuck her arm in and grabbed another egg; unbelievably, the woman next to me had ordered one as well. The other jar-egg aficionado smiled at me and I noticed she was easily ninety and was missing several of the more critical teeth. These were my new people. The egg was sliced in half and put next to my sandwich. A bit of fluid leaked from the egg and contaminated my cheese. I tried not to scream.

The egg itself was kind of lovely, if you weren’t expecting it to look like an egg. The cutaway side had a dot of yellow in the middle, which then became orange, then florescent purple, and then pink. It was an airbrushed picture of a sunset on the side of a van, it was a Big Stick popsicle, but it wasn’t an egg. It was especially not an egg because whatever other things the brine had contributed during their possibly years-long life together, it had changed the texture of the part which had once been the yolk. The entire thing was an undifferentiated mass of solidity. I touched the egg; it bent and then sprung back.

Quickly, before I could manage to drop it on the ground and race for the door, I shoved half the egg into my mouth and started chewing. While driving down to the restaurant, I had tried out a few adjectives in advance. Disgusting? Was it going to be disgusting? Vile? Rancid? Somehow, would it turn out to be delicious? Wouldn’t it be fun if it turned out to be oddly delicious? This wasn’t completely out of the range of possibility. In certain restaurants in Los Angeles, there are jars of what appears to be a jar of used dishwashing water with a ladle in it. Anyone with a sense of survival would tell you the only possible use for that liquid would be to shine up your pennies and quarters. But that liquid is, in fact, a traditional Mexican beverage called horchata and it can be really delicious and those who drink it just learn to ignore the color, which is an unwholesome beige. Perhaps the jar-egg was just terribly misunderstood.

Here’s what you need to know about Phillipe’s jar-eggs: they taste like a beet-infused eraser. I chewed that first half for about three minutes before it broke down into small enough bits so that I could swallow it. I felt it fight its way down my esophagus and settle into my stomach, which recoiled in confusion. Fine, be like that. One half jar-egg down, one half jar-egg to go. I popped the eraser in my mouth, had a nice long chew and went to swallow, only to find that my throat simply refused to let down chewed beety jar-egg. I argued with my throat, but my throat was steadfast; this wasn’t food and we weren’t swallowing it.

In desperation, I finally offered, “Tell you what. Swallow the jar-egg and before it even bounces hideously off our stomach-lining I’ll drink the Diet Coke and make the flavor go away. And I’d take this offer if I were you, throat, because in order to get this egg away from my tongue I am fully prepared to start massaging you like I do to get the cat to take her pills.”

I wasn’t bluffing. I never bluff when it comes to get the flavor of beet out of my mouth. Resentfully, my throat allowed the egg to pass. Quickly, I followed it with Diet Coke and then a slightly beet-scented cheese sandwich. All told, eating the egg had taken no more than seven minutes. I was exhausted. But I was also pleased. I had done something I suspected I would dislike, I had stared it down and I had prevailed. If I could do a small, disgusting, brave thing, maybe I could do another brave thing. I wasn’t going to run my own sheep farm in Australia, but maybe if I did enough of these small brave acts, someone might describe me as being “Fun and up for stuff” as opposed to “ Timid and usually eating a burrito.”

I cleaned up my table. A woman, searching for a seat in this peak hour, rushed to my side, her tray in her hand. I noted she had no jar-egg.

“Are you finished?” she asked. I said, “Oh, yes” and smiled a private smile. I then burped egg and beets and thought, this modeling good behavior is no place for amateurs.

But, wait!

One more. Consort just read the blog with the winners and said, "Where's Judy?" And I explained that I felt like four was almost too much and five was too much and it killed me but Judy was cut. And then Consort said, "Judy's answer was hilarious and five is too many to whom, exactly? It's your blog, it's your rules."

And he's right, isn't he?

Judy, write to me. I have a book of yours.

It's an Honor Just to be Nominated

Thanks to everyone who participated. It seems many of us long to poke young hopeful couples and make them see clearly. Choosing someone to receive a copy of my book Notes from the Underwire was challenging. So challenging, in fact, that I'm giving out four. If you're a winner, leave me a message on Twitter (I'm Quinncy), and I'll send it right off.

First, Kristin, because when you go to the ER as often as I do, you know exactly how important the calm person who remembers to bring change for the vending machines is.

Second, Runs Like a Gay for correctly pointing out that "Let's get the dishes done tonight so we don't have to see them in the morning" will always sigh when "It's better to let them soak until morning" has their say.

Next, Tammy for taking us through a specific-yet-universal Ikea experience. I suspect this wasn't fiction-writing, but we won't take points off for that.

Finally, Michaele for articulating something I had meant to flog harder in the story. If they speak horribly to a waiter, take heed. Some day, they'll use that tone with you.

If I could have, I'd have handed out fifty three books, that's how much fun I had reading these. Thanks again, and now go off and tell single people how to run their lives.

Coda

Several people I know have gleefully come up with situations for courting couples to attempt. They've had entirely too much fun, as I did when I poked and prodded my guinea pigs for three weeks. So I'm asking you: what should couples do to determine compatibility before actually dating?

Best answer gets an autographed copy of my book.

You Can't Have One Without the Other

(If you're new, please read this, and then this. Sure, I can't make you, but you'll have no one to blame but yourself when this makes even less sense than I usually make.)

It's time for breakfast. You two will be going to a local diner which has been there for eighty years. Coincidentally, the waitstaff has also been there eighty years. All you two want is caffeine and it’s being brought to you by a sweet grandmotherly lady who appears to have Parkinsons disease, which means she inches across the room and then sloshes half the pour into your saucer and a bit into your lap. She’s terribly apologetic for that, as she is a few minutes later when, having misheard you two, she brings a roast-beef sandwich instead of toast and a turkey leg instead of eggs. Within five minutes, you’ll each know how much tolerance the other person has for frailty and, believe me, you want to know that.

But hurry, my little guinea pigs, hurry, finish up your roast beef and turkey (and, puzzlingly, ambrosia salad and pickles, which arrived on a plate together), because we need to get down to the city and go to...the mall! Because we are our most like ourselves in the mall, bless our little hearts. First, you find a parking space. Too many of us are Park in the farthest part of the lot so no one scratches the car. Whatever time we lose walking a quarter of a mile we save in not driving around near the elevator, married to I am prepared to sit in the lane for as long as it takes for this moron to finish adjusting his rear-view mirror and flossing. A parking-space next to the elevator is worth more than rubies to me. RUBIES! We can avoid a lifetime’s sniping and silences right now with one short trip to Nordstroms. Again, it doesn’t matter what sort of parker each one of you is, as long as you’re in agreement.

[But you close-parkers are really weird. What is that, some unfinished hunter-gatherer thing?]

[Consort would like you close-parkers to know that you’re completely right; a few minutes spent getting a nearby spot is worth it after shopping, if you’re carrying big bags. He also wants to you know that I have on occasion parked so far from the mall entrance that he thinks I was parked in another mall. In another county.]

Having parked, you are in the mall and this morning will be spent finding him a pair of socks. In 2002, he found a pair of sort of khaki socks which went perfectly with most of the pants he wore for work. He bought six pair and has never seen them since. This doesn’t stop him from checking in every single store for those socks. You must keep him company. If you feel like it, you can also paw through the racks, holding up what you think are khaki socks. Just be prepared to be snickered at, because the khaki socks he had were so much better. Your job is to look supportive and say nothing. If you want, consider this a sign of tenacity. Perhaps if you two got married and you disappeared, he might spend years and years looking for you. That is, of course, if you went with as many things as these socks did.

Mid-day break. You get to go to a movie! Of course, you two have to agree to which movie, and what snacks to get. If you’re Twizzlers and she’s nachos, that’s something you’ll want to know. If he’s five kinds of candy and a Diet Coke and you’re a bottled water and unbuttered popcorn, you’re probably not going to be sharing snacks, at the very least. And oh, the movie. Does it star Sandra Bullock or does it star robots? Does it take place in Edwardian England or does it take place in an England populated by zombies? I’m not assuming who wants to see whom; I’ve known quite a few female action-movie fans and not every man sitting in a movie theater watching an adaptation of Henry James is there by force. Under usual dating circumstance, someone would be polite and say something like “I’ve heard great things about ‘G.I. Joe’,” but we’re not under normal circumstance, are we? You two are exhausted and your hair looks weird and in the case of one of you, haven’t found your socks again. You two are much more likely to see how deeply the other person actually feels about Shia LaBeouf.

You’re welcome.

Having settled on the movie, now you must find a seat in the theater. Some people don’t care in the slightest, so long as they aren’t behind someone who starts for the Pacers. Some people are Consort, grimly determined to sit in the perfect seat. Usually that means inching around the group of nuns in the middle of the row, getting to the seats, determining that the perfect seats are just one seat over, asking the nuns to move down one seat, sitting down in our new seats only for Consort to suspect the perfect seats are one row in front of us. Now, I love him and the nun’s boss knows I have far weirder quirks, but as one has spent more than one set of previews trudging through a movie theater like a desert nomad, I want to make sure no one else unknowingly falls in love with a Seater.

After the movie, you two are refreshed and possibly illuminated as to the other person’s movie habits (I believe talkers, snoring nappers and ostentatious bag-rustlers should carry a warning label). Good, because now it’s time to separate the amateurs from the professionals. She’s going to try on jeans; she’d like your opinion.

Young man, where are you going? Get back here. Oh, stop sniveling, it’s not that hard. You just need to tell her if she looks better in this pair or that pair.

Or this pair?

Or this pair?

Or this pair?

Or this pair?

Does the second pair give her a muffin-top? You don’t remember? Then let’s go back to that store and try them on again. Now, is there a muffin-top? What do you mean, “No more than any other pair”? What is that, a joke? You’re saying she’s got a muffin-top in all of them? You’re saying she’s flabby?

How about this pair?

Or this pair?

Or this pair?

You know what, let’s go back and look at all of them again the darker wash. And the darker wash, in the boot-cut.

Her job is to maintain some semblance of self-esteem as she starts to suspect all jeans were designed to make her favor her grandfather, who is seventy-eight and has no butt. His job is to hold her purse and every third or fourth pair, compliment her on her butt.

I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t want you two to stay married.

Finally, several hours later, a cashier is ringing up one pair of jeans. You two are exhausted, sick of the sight of one another and toying with the idea of faking your own death in order to get away. We Marriage Marathon producers sweep in and grab each of you, taking you to separate hotel rooms. In each room is a nice outfit, a working hairdryer and your beauty products of choice. Maybe you take a catnap. An hour or so later, we swing back to pick you up and we bring you to a nice restaurant. Out in the patio, under the twinkling lights, is your weekend companion, cleaned-up and beaming.

Now you may have a date.

If over a decade in the marital trenches has taught me anything, it’s that the date shouldn’t be placed at the beginning but at the end of the courtship. If you can look across the table at someone and think “You chew your ice and the sock thing is a little weird, but you make me laugh and you pulled all the dark-wash straight-cut jeans in my size without a word of protest,” you’re nearly home. Personally, I think a good marriage isn’t defined by the trips to Hawaii; it’s saying “I’m going to get the car battery replaced, want to come along?” Because anyone looks good on the beaches of Oahu, but your spouse looks good keeping you company at Sears.

Thanks for letting this story take three weeks. Now, I’m going to leave Consort a voice-mail, telling him how lucky I am and see if he wants to go on a date tonight.

This I Tell You Brother

If you don't read the previous blog, this will make less sense than usual. So, really, just read it.


While you two sober up, we allow you two to sit in the vineyard gardens. It’s lovely there: the sunlight dappling the grape vines, the quiet only broken by the gentle buzzing of the bees at the nearby beehives, the friendly vineyard dog. The very friendly dog. Buster, the nine month-old Labrador retriever with the crotch fetish and the submissive peeing issue. I don’t care where each of you is on the subject of pets. But if we address this now, you should never turn to your mate and say in a hurt voice, “But I thought you LIKED dogs!” If Buster checking out your undercarriage and baptizing your shoes doesn’t bother you, you can safely be called a dog person. For a small additional fee, I can arrange for the barn cat to spring unexpectedly into someone’s lap and claw-bat viciously at any attempt to pet its rump.

Everyone feeling sober after the wine tasting? Good, because you have a room reservation for the night up at a quaint cottage in the mountains. The front desk closes at dusk. The sun is heading towards the treetops.

Race, daters, race.

Learn how the driver handles narrow mountain roads when the possibility of sleeping in the car grows with each passing minute. Learn what sort of relationship the passenger has with The Creator as the car careens up the twisty two-laner and careens around a succession of logging trucks hauling what seems to be the entire Adirondacks.

Race, daters, race.

Arrive at the bungalow court with minutes to spare. Grab your key and head for the restaurant. Discover the restaurant is closed. Ask the desk-clerk where the locals eat. Learn that in the thirty-seconds it took to discover the restaurant was closed, the desk-clerk has evaporated. Cobble together a dinner from what is in the car: a fine repast of Tums, damp Cheetos, the last Slim Jim and a bottle of Clamato juice. Neither one of you drinks the Clamato juice.

[As provisioners of this exercise, we keep a can of Clamato juice in the car for just this moment. We have yet to replace it.]

Finally, you two are in your room. Perhaps, even through the rigors of the day, you have grown to find each other attractive. Perhaps you find each other extremely attractive. Perhaps you just want something pleasant to happen in this day. Well, whatever licentious thoughts you’re having you can just leave in the car with the clam juice. We’re looking for a person who can take you through your life, not through the night. And to keep you two focused on this larger goal, may I introduce the people in the cabin next to yours? Today, these people attended a wedding for friends in the clearing down by the waterfall. It was a lovely wedding, sweet and solemn. The people in the next cabin are compensating for having behaved like little angels all day by drinking a hearty mixture of peppermint schnapps and Robitussin. Here’s a favorite phrase of theirs:

WOO-HOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

They have a few other choice phrases as well but they are all too obscene to render here. They also seem to have lots of hobbies, including:

1.) Smoking what they would call cigars but others would call used gym socks soaked in kim chee,
2.) Urinating against the wall of your cabin,
3.) Offering to kick each others asses. The women seem especially fond of this one.
4.) Vomiting on to your porch.

There is a phone in your room but the front desk-clerk has long gone back to civilization. Now it’s just you, your not-exactly date and your new friends the Visigoths. Watch closely how your companion handles this. Does she demand that you “Do something!” even though you’ve just heard them kick down an outbuilding because they thought it was looking at them funny? Does he say wistfully, “If I had a gun...” leading you to believe that he has only two gears, using a gun and wishing he had a gun? Does he negotiate with them, offering them Clamato juice? The car? You? Does she wait until they’re defiling a tree and burn down their cabin? Trust me; you need to know these things.

Eventually, dawn arrives and the Visigoths fall asleep, possibly resting in preparation of a later marauding attack on the Boy Scout camp down the road. You both sneak out, but not before discovering the outlets in the cabin were installed during the Metric Outlet Great Leap Forward of 1975, thereby leaving everyone without a hair-dryer, forced to go into the world without product and a flattening brush. I’m making sure you both have all the information you need.


Next time, we finish our Marathon. Frankly, I'm having entirely too good a time torturing them, but I fear they could start invoking the Geneva Convention.

Go Together Like a Horse and Carriage

Here’s a marvelous source of inner Quinn-tension. I find people who are very unlike me fascinating and I want to know all about them. But I also don’t want to talk to anyone new nor do I want to travel. Really, I’d rather not leave the house at all. Luckily there are these things called books and for the price of a Los Angeles Public Library card, I can wallow in the lives of others to my voyeuristic heart's content. Sometimes this other life is so completely alien to the world I know that I get another book out, and then another still. Sometimes, Consort notices and picks up the seventh book in a row about a wife running away from her family and towards Stavros (the underage monosyllabic Greek fisherman). He waves the book at me and says, “Is there something I should know?” Which is, of course, absurd because he knows how I feel about planes. As long as I have the love of a good man and a library card, what need have I of Stavros?

This spring, I was all about God; the God of the late-adolescent Evangelical variety. First, I read “God’s Harvard” written by a political journalist who spent two years embedded at Patrick Henry College which fancies itself the Christian equivalent of the Ivy League. Having partaken of a world where a visible bra strap brings a warning email and drinking can get one expelled, I was fascinated and craved more. Luckily, there was “The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University,” written by a college student who took a semester off from Brown University to attend Liberty University, founded by Jerry Falwell. Like Patrick Henry, this is a place of modest clothing and more modest behavior. I was raised pretty conservatively in many ways but I also grew up in a city which, along with San Francisco and New York, stands in for Sodom and/or Gomorrah for many of the people I was now reading about. I know Christians. I know Evangelical Christians. But I don’t know these kinds of Evangelical Christians.

More, I demanded! Give me more!

Having no other books about the colleges, I delved into source material. I read websites about modest dress for women and stared in fascination at modest bathing suits. Consort glanced over my shoulder at the pictures of young women smiling into the camera, up to their knees in the surf, their hair in waist-length braids, their bathing suits covering everything but their forearms. He looked at the screen and then at me. “Is there something I should know?”

Which is, of course, absurd because he knows how I feel about the beach.

And then there’s dating. Dating. Evangelical teenagers of this particular stripe don’t date like their peers date. They don’t date like Gen-Xers dated. They don’t date like their grandparents dated. They date like characters in Jane Austen novels dated. They court. And they only do that when they are ready to find a marriage partner. There’s a book which is very influential among this group (I’d call it a Bible for them but, well, you know). It's called “I Kissed Dating Goodbye.” Once I read about this book I simply had to have it, to finish my set as it were. I got it out of the library and snuck it into the house because I suspected this was going to be the tipping point into Consort’s suggesting I needed to go outside and see actual people.

For those of you who haven’t read "I Kissed Dating Goodbye", let me summarize: The young man who wrote the book, Joshua Harris, says that it’s best not to date because when you date without expectations of marriage, you will eventually hurt someone or get hurt, thus hardening your heart against the true love to come. Harris says dating is ultimately about premarital sex which, do we even need to say, is a huge “Oh, I don’t THINK so” for Evangelicals. He also says that dating in the modern sense -- of hanging-out with benefits -- gives a person very little sense of what being married to this other person would actually be like. So, unless you are prepared to consciously court this person with an eye towards marriage, don’t even start down the path.

I finished a chapter and set down the book. I had just reached my favorite phase of the delving into the utterly-unlike-me-person’s life, the moment of dim recognition. It’s safe to say Mr. Harris and I probably won’t be hosting a panel together anytime soon but he and I can agree on one thing: dating has very little to do with marriage. No wonder we’ve all had friends who spent the first two years of their marriage getting over the disappointment that life wasn’t turning out to be a Nora Ephron romantic comedy. In fact, the dating personality is stuffed in the back of the closet within a week of getting married. After five years of marriage, your spouse’s dating personality only comes out at dinner parties when he or she is sitting next to someone toned and younger than themself. You stare across the table at your mate, all sparkling and witty, and think, “I got five sentences out of you today. Three were about the septic tank.” And you are sad and justifiably angry, because this wasn’t what you were promised when you dated.

So, in the interest of building marriages to last, I have developed a program. It’s called the Quinn Cummings Marriage Marathon. Unlike Mr. Harris, I have no opinion on your dating life before you feel ready to settle down. But if you meet someone and think here might be the other parent to your future children, you begin the process. Don’t worry about their political leanings, their sense of humor, their hobbies and interests. We’re going to get all the information we need.

First, you two are going to take a two-day road trip. Each person will bring what they consider to be appropriate road food, good road-trip music and a reasonable amount of luggage. People have been known to pretend to prefer classical music and a locovore diet for a dinner or two, but the thought of four hundred miles in a car brings out the Slim Jims and the Lynyrd Skynyrd mix tape. You might find that charming. You might find that maddening. You might find it charmingly maddening, or maddeningly charming. You’re still getting in that car.

But not until you pack the trunk with your three suitcases and his plastic bag which contains a toothbrush, one change of underwear and a single sock. And if you complain about this being too hard, we’ll hand you a two year-old child who only likes Radio Disney and is coming down with an ear infection. Be grateful we’re just giving you a car which will make a possibly alarming noise only one of you can hear.

Now, drive. Drive and talk. Drive and don’t talk. Learn about each other. Does she share her dried fruit? Does he read signs out loud?

[Consort unconsciously does that. I love him very, very much, but I still kind of wish I had known that ahead of time.]

Does he fart and laugh? Does she fart and laugh?

[Consort pointedly wants my readers to know he doesn't do that.]

[Which means I now have to say I don't do it, either.]

Does he insist the fuel economy is improved by keeping the air conditioner off and the sun roof open? Does she talk during the more important drum solos? Again, none of these behaviors might be a dealbreaker but the average American lifespan is now in the high seventies. You need to know what you're in for.

After an hour or so, a cell-phone will ring. It will be the most high-maintenance relative this person has. As part of the exercise we will put this conversation on speakerphone and you will listen to an arms-length domestic problem for up to forty-five minutes. Maybe a younger-sister whining about her roommate or a cousin trying to raise money for a llama farm. It might be a father with a computer problem and a theory about the IRS he wants to discuss. While one person must deal with this relative, the "date" can think things like I will have to see this person at Thanksgiving, possibly for many decades and I wonder if this personality quirk is genetic.

After the family crisis is resolved, the other person’s exhausting family member will call. If it's the woman's turn, the call will be from her mother because men, you really need to know how that relationship goes. Once again, that’s not something which comes up in regular dating but the Quinn Cummings Marriage Marathon aims to keep the divorce rate low, one pair of opened eyes at a time.

After the calls, both people in the car will have to agree where to eat lunch. The only options will be a dubious-looking roadside stand offering fish tacos hundreds of miles from the sea and a Howard Johnson. Within minutes, you will know all you need to know about the other person’s risk-taking tendencies; and possibly, intestinal fortitude. After lunch, we will hand one of you a map. Oh, and while you were out of the car, we took out the road-music and switched the station to talk-radio. You must get yourselves to a wine-tasting room whose address we have scrawled on a slip of paper. It’s either 212 Elms Lane or 712 Alms Lane. Neither is on your map, although there seems to be an Ulmsford Drive. The wine-tasting room closes in an hour. You must either talk about the directions or listen to talk-radio. In this way, you will learn how you each handle conflict.

Having arrived at Aspen Lane with four minutes to spare, you are allowed to taste the wines of your choosing for three minutes. Typical dating means carefully regulating how much the other person sees you drink in order to make the best impression and to not say or do something you will regret. This is not dating. If the other person tries to forget the last hour driving up and down endless rows of identical vines by drinking the fruits of every single one of these vines, remind yourself that this might be due to stress. Of course, one day you’ll be at Thanksgiving with this person and that idiot cousin will be going on about llama farming and stress will need to be relieved but you'll be the one staying sober so someone can drive your family home before the llama-farm brochures get handed out.

Again, I’m not saying it’s a dealbreaker, but it’s something you should know.

This is getting long so I'm going to let my hapless victims sober up before I finish them off. Next week " The Quinn Cummings Marriage Marathon" Part II.

Blog Book Tour: Nanny Goats in Panties

If the name of the website didn't grab you, the fact that I admit my true feelings about goats should.

http://www.nannygoatsinpanties.com/

Public Service Announcement

A brief digression today. I had lunch with my mother and we were talking about her volunteer work. She works with a group that places alarm systems into the houses and apartments of elderly people who want to be able to alert someone if they get hurt or sick. You know, “I’ve fallen and I can get up!” Only reputable. Anyway, she was telling me about her most recent client. And, as she often does, she was shuddering at the multiple piles of objects, thingies, whatsies and overall crap this person had all over their apartment.

“This woman was bedridden,” my mother said, grabbing a spear of asparagus, “If she hits the alarm, I don’t think an EMT stretcher could get around all her stuff and into her bedroom to get her.”

This wasn’t the first time I had heard a story like this from her. She swears that at the end of every shift, she comes home and gets rid of a couple of objects. Another year of this, she’ll be down to a fork and a flashlight. I skipped over discussing her potentially monastic life and asked the larger question.

“What percent of the people you see have this much stuff?”

She thought. She chewed. She swallowed.

“That bad? Maybe only ten percent. But I’d say seventy percent of the elderly people have too much stuff in their house.”

I gestured with a breadstick. “Define ‘Too much’.”

Too much is a loaded term. One person’s “Cozy” is another person’s “So…many…pillows. Can’t…breathe…”

“Too much is when you aren’t stable when you walk and there isn’t a single clear space on a tabletop where you could put your hand to balance if you had to. Too much is stacks of mail left next to the stove. Too much is having a vision problem and the floor strewn with small objects. These people maybe won’t die directly from too much stuff, but they’ll end up in the hospital from a run-in with their stuff.”

“Seventy percent?”

“Yep.”

I felt contrary, so I played Devil’s Advocate. “Is it possible that the population needing alarm systems is already more fragile than the regular elderly population and therefore isn’t as on top of cleaning? That the average older person’s house isn’t quite so cluttered?”

My mom shrugged.

“Probably. But I’ll tell you that at least half of my friends could do with holding a really big garage sale.”

The population is aging. I know very few people who don’t have a relative over the age of seventy they aren’t helping in some way or another. Maybe you don’t get over to their place a lot, or maybe you do but you’ve developed a blind spot to the clutter. Maybe the clutter makes you nuts but who needs the drama of that conversation? I sympathize, but it has to be done. I asked my mother what I should tell my readers if I wrote about this and this is what she said:

Tell them to look around the older person’s house and try to imagine coming through with a stretcher. Tell them that when I volunteer in the ER, I help people fill out their forms when they arrive and that nearly every fall an elderly person takes in their house was avoidable. Tell them that the “Grandma, let’s pack away some of your stuff” conversation is less awkward than the “Grandma, your broken hip means we need to sell the house” conversation. Oh, and tell them to get those small area rugs off the floor. I can’t believe how many of those I see in old people’s houses.

Consider yourself told.

Turn and Face the Strain

Okay, you fans of Facebook, I shall put this in language you might recognize. My drag-queen name is I Hate Facebook. My top five favorite movies are I Hate Facebook. The last ten books I read were I Hate Facebook. The Brady child I would be is Marcia, HATING FACEBOOK.

I wanted to participate, I truly did. The twenty-first century wasn’t going to move on without me. I spent a few months dabbling in discovering that friends of friends of mine were eager for me to see their Equity-waiver plays and waiting for the plumber to arrive and I said something like “Eh.” And I thought I had closed the account, but it turns out that when you think you’re closing the account you’re only sending it into suspended animation.

So when a year later my editor and agent suggested Facebook for networking and helping to sell my book, I opened up Facebook and thought I’d start a new account but look! There is my old account, looking fresh and rested after a year of being ignored. And there are friends of friends, who are now waiting for electricians to arrive. I started again, and I got poked and tickled and I heard from people who like the blog and people with whom I went to grade school and every once in a while I got an e-mandala or a petition to sign. I didn’t quite see the point to most of this activity but I gave it the benefit of the doubt. Somehow, this would help me sell books by being available to readers.

Then, two months ago, something weird started happening. I’d get a friend request email and when I went to click on it, there wouldn’t be an actual friend request on the Facebook page. Sometimes it was people I knew; sometimes it was people who had figured out that Quinn Cummings was probably Quinn Cummings and just wanted to make contact with me. Friends, classmates, strangers; all were ghosts in the machine. I thought, “Ah! Facebook will be able to explain that!” because I was young and stupid.

This was when I learned that Facebook wants all of us to communicate with the whole wide world, but not them. There was no FAQ for this little problem. There is no contact number for Facebook problems. Facebook claims to be based in Palo Alto, yet when you call information, they are unlisted. In the meanwhile, I was getting plaintive friend requests like, “I’m sure you’re not interested in making friends with your readers, but your book made me so happy and I just wanted to let you know that. But I’m just bothering you, I guess.” No, reader, YOU aren’t bothering me. Facebook is bothering me very much. And Facebook couldn’t care less if I had sent them an e-cupcake.

I left a note on Facebook to the effect of “I hate Facebook very much because they are eating friends and business contacts.” Many people tried to help. Emails flew back and forth like this:

HELPER: Oh, you just need to click on the “Receive” button [It wasn’t receive, but it was something like that.]

QUINN: I don’t have a “Receive” button.

H: Sure you do. It’s under the “Decorate Cupcake” button and above the “Alphabetize Your Favorite Taylor Swift Songs” and “Create Timesucking Quiz” button.

Q: Got “Cupcake,” which is right on top of “Taylor Swift.” Between there’s nothing.

H: Oh. You might be screwed.

Yeah, that sounded about right. Time to kill me in Facebook land, if for no other reason than I needed to stop appearing to ignore people. I did some research and found out how to kill your page in Facebook. It’s crazy-hard, almost dissertation-in-Theology hard, and nearly as contingent on faith, but I did everything. I finally reached the last thing I had to click, which said something like “ARE YOU REALLY REALLY SURE YOU WANT TO LEAVE (LISTED EVERY SINGLE FRIEND THEY HAD DEIGNED TO LET ME HAVE)?” I smiled as I clicked “Yes.”

And then another page came up.

“Well, okay. As long as there is no activity on your page for two weeks, we’ll close your account. If there’s any activity, we’ll assume you want to keep your account open.”

I heard a sullen tone but I didn’t care. Facebook could go off and quiz itself over who was the hotter Darrin on “Bewitched,” and I could rest confident knowing in two weeks my nightmare would be over. I’d go back to unintentionally insulting people in my usual ways and leave Facebook out of it.

But oh, didn’t the book of faces have the last laugh. Because while I didn’t touch Facebook, people continued to try to friend me, and every time they tried to friend me, it reset the two-week clock. I will never be free of these fools. I can’t even get on my account and leave some message to be read by all comers about how it’s not them, it’s me and how much I hate Facebook and why not? Because my account information no longer works.

So if you’ve sent me a friend request and have been rewarded with silence, please know that silence is filled with pain and frustration and futility. And daytime drinking.

Blog Book Tour: Joyce Saenz Harris

But, wait! One more!

Cork Mountain Incident

...And then I’m back from the Quinn Cummings Seemingly Endless Yet Oddly Fun for Her Book Blog Tour 2009.

During one of those weeks, because I’m all about adding a degree of difficulty just to see what fear tastes like, my family visited four cities in seven days. First we spent two and a half days in DC. Then we spent two nights near Bryn Mawr outside of Philadelphia. Then we spent a night in Philadelphia. Then we spent a night in Wilmington, Delaware. Three of these locations were lovely and interesting and historic; one lacked any qualities whatsoever. I’ll let you decide which was which.

Before we left, I was at Marina’s house, in the yard watching our children argue over whose turn it was to use the big water-gun when I suddenly spied something in the corner. Even in the shadows, my brain knew what those were. I was suddenly flooded with endorphins. I was barely able to gasp, “Are those…Kork-Ease?”

“Oh, you remember those?” Marina giggled.

Do I remember those? My entire sixth-grade was spent trying to convince my mother that high-heeled Kork-Ease wouldn’t make me look trashy. My mother counter-offered with the low-heeled Kork-Ease. I sneered. It was to be the high-heeled Kork-Ease my friends Shannon and Autumn wore or it was to be nothing at all.

It was to be nothing at all. Shannon and Autumn both ended up in rehab before their junior year of high-school which my mother has always mystically attributed to those shoes. In time, I grew old enough to wear heels whenever I felt so inclined but by then Kork-Ease had grown out of fashion. By then I had also learned that whatever femininity heels bring to the table is offset by the sensation of driving your toes through the working end of a fountain pen. I hadn’t thought of Kork-Ease in years but I was certainly thinking of them now. Marina let me try hers on. I sashayed around the house, my inner sixth-grader shrieking in delight. Marina crooned, “They’re on sale at Zappos. Free shipping, too.”

Free shipping? I can be 5’7” with free shipping? Done. They arrived two days later. I sashayed around my house and decided they went with everything. Daughter offered to help me break them in by clomping around the house but I vetoed that in my strong voice. Abuse my black satin dress shoes if you must, daughter of mine, because the odds of my going to a formal event are small; but the Kork-Ease are going to go with everything and also somehow reverse time and not make me a weird loser in high school.

When I packed a few days later for the Trip of Many Hotel Rooms the Kork-Ease were on the top of the suitcase pile. We had some evening plans, some dinner plans with friends and work-type things; also, I had to visit a few bookstores and meet store managers and smile at them. I figured it would be easier to smile if I was very tall. And it was, truly. The Kork-Ease did everything I had hoped for including giving me a girlish sway to my walk which comes from trying very hard not to fall down. Consort went with us as far as Philly then peeled off a day early for the "Paris of the Mid-Atlantic states" which is Wilmington, Delaware. The kid and I spent a day by ourselves in Philly, cramming in the few remaining Revolutionary nuggets we hadn’t gotten to the day before. On Thurdsay, we checked out of our hotel and, grabbing our luggage, headed to the subway which would take us to the train station which would get us to Wilmington.

Wouldn’t you think a concierge, if asked whether the subway was to the right or the left of a hotel entrance, would send you in the right direction? Wouldn’t you, in fact, assume that’s the very least you can expect of a concierge? Daughter and I walked quite a few blocks, our rolling luggage bouncing over the cobblestoned streets, before I started to realize that the fact that we were heading deeper into the industrial district probably meant we were heading the wrong way. So we headed back. But because we were in the old part of Philadelphia, before people had discovered straight lines, going back where we came from delivered us to another area entirely.

[Someone just wrote in asking, Quinn, how did you get lost on a neighborhood built on a grid? Take my word for it, if there's one single alley which doesn't align with the rest of the state, I will find it and I will take and I will get lost.]

I stared at my map and declared us hopelessly lost. I wasn’t too worried, though, because we weren’t expected anyplace for hours and we were in a big city, chock-full of cabs happy to correct our little misadventure with only the liberal application of money.

Well, they would have, if only the cabs hadn’t been on strike that day. Dozens of them drove past us with signs in their windows indicating their displeasure over something. As a rule I’m inclined to side with David over Goliath, but I really wished they had suffered in silence for one more afternoon. Having perused the map and accosted anyone who looked like a local, I knew we had to walk in that direction for as long as we could. At some point, we’d reach the train station, get to a main road and get on a bus to the subway. Or we’d die from the heat and the humidity at which point they’d put mob-caps on us and declare us Colonial death-reenactors. My daughter and I trudged onward, pulling our suitcases behind us until we finally got to Rittenhouse Square, a place notable because we could pick up the subway from there. Our adventure was nearly over and I could rest assured that my kid had seen and smelled more of Philadelphia than most of its police officers. She and I stood for a second in the center of the park, basking in the shade of the first trees we had seen in about two miles when someone tapped my shoulder.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” the filthy homeless man said, “I think this is yours.”

He handed me a bright-pink sports bra. He pointed to my luggage, which had come unzipped, possibly from the clash of twentieth-century technology and eighteenth-century sidewalks. I gingerly took my bra, thanked him without actually looking at him and quickly dropped to my knees to examine the damage. My first concern was Consort’s GPS system, which he had been using in the rental car and had left with me to bring to Wilmington. It was small and it was expensive, just the sort of thing to go bouncing out but I quickly found it. My second fear was less financial and more bourgeois; had I functioned as some kind of Johnny Appleseed of underwear throughout the city? Johnny Lingerie? Well, I wasn’t going to pull everything out, but a rough headcount (as it were) led me to believe only the sports bra had made a break for it. I sighed in relief. I bought the kid a drink from a push-cart and we finally got on the subway and the train.

That night in Wilmington, I was telling Consort about my adventure, holding up the sports bra gingerly on the tip of my pinky when I noticed something in my luggage. I grabbed a Kork-Ease and then I flung everything else out of the luggage. There was no second Kork-Ease. Somewhere between Penn’s Landing and Rittenhouse Square, we had taken a casualty. A nearly unworn Kork-Ease shoe was now a citizen of the City of Brotherly Love.

We got back to Los Angeles and I started calling. The representative from Zappos, while sympathetic and frankly a little entertained, couldn’t sell me a single shoe. She suggested I try the Kork-Ease company. The representative from Kork-Ease, while sympathetic and frankly a little entertained, couldn’t sell me a single shoe. I have made my peace with the fact that if I’m to have a pair of Kork-Ease in my life, I’m going to have to buy another pair. I can’t say as I’m happy about it, but I’ll survive. But because I'm me, I can't throw away a perfectly good spinster sandal which committed no greater crime than not having made a break for it along with its partner.

Which is why there’s now a single sandal sitting, damning and mute, on the Bench of Random Objects, waiting for me to meet a single-legged woman who has the same unfinished business from her childhood.

Hey, I found fun things to do in Wilmington, Delaware. Anything can happen.

I Want to Thank You for Being My Foundation

As of tomorrow, a new blog goes up and the Quinn Cummings Seemingly Endless Blog Book Tour 2009 officially ends. I want to thank each and every person who wrote in with questions and linked. It's been just about as much fun as anyone could ever have on a publicity tour.

Now, back to work.

Blog Book Tour: Karen Dalton-Beninato

Karen asks and I answer. And I do it on The Huffington Post!

Blog Book Tour: Book Critic

Book Critic asks and I answer. See if I sound better when the questions are Canadian.

Book Blog Tour: Stet

Stet asks and I answer. Discover how few good writing habits I have.

Book Blog Tour: Weronika

The humblingly youthful Weronika asks and I answer. I allude to flossing. That's not a code word for something dirty.

Book Blog Tour: Lisa

Lisa asks:

Am I right that Alice [In the book, Daughter goes as Alice] is not her actual name ?

No, it's not. Here's an odd one; when I was pregnant, Consort suggested Alice as a potential name in case the baby was a girl. I liked it but didn't love it and nixed it. Eight years later, when my editor told me Daughter had to be something besides Daughter, I gave the kid a chance to name herself, something few people get to experience. Never having heard the story of the earlier-jettisoned name, she quickly said "Alice."

Book Blog Tour: Claire

Claire asks:

I grew up with one of my grandparents' friends named Quinn, a man. In my head Quinn is a boy's name. And I had a great aunt named Aunt Virgil, obviously a woman. To me, Virgil is a girl's name but everyone I have ever met has looked at me funny when I mentioned Aunt Virgil because to them it is a boy's name. So is Quinn a family name? Is it traditionally a boy name or is it either? Do you have a naming story about your name?

It's an ancient Celtic name meaning "Wise," which only proves how little the name affects the child. It's also a boy's name. Here's how I got it. My mother wanted her child to have a strong androgynous name which couldn't be made easily into a nickname, whichever gender it was. She spent the better part of the pregnancy looking around, finally settling on a couple of options. When she was about ready to deliver, my parents went to have dinner with friends who already had a couple of children. The three year-old was testing limits, because three year-olds must do that or lose their union card. The hostess finally said in frustration to her son, "Daniel Quinn Monaghan, if you don't get back into your room and into bed, I swear to God I'll..."

The rest of the threat was lost to history, but the invoking of the dreaded middle name gave my parents a new option for a middle name. They took it. And here I am, numbly aware that thanks to a boy who couldn't stay asleep, I'll have to spell my name until I die. But I do like the name.

Book Blog Tour: Elizabeth

Elizabeth asks:

1. You've explained (wonderfully) how you fell out of love with acting...but I still wonder how you originally got into it - your own passion/impetus or someone else's?

We had a neighbor we saw when we would walk our dogs together. As it happened, his name was James Wong Howe and he was among the greatest cinematographers in the world. He decided seven year-old me would make a good actor. He called an agent, who called my mother to set up an appointment to meet me one afternoon. I had just gotten home from school. I was in the tub, filthy, hair half-unbraided, picked gravel out of my knee from the recess incident. My mother poked her head in the bathroom and said, "It seems as if we're going to meet an agent today for you. Get dressed." I pulled my hair back into braids, sort of, slapped a Band-Aid over the oozing, and went off to meet the agent. Within an hour, the agent had me at a commercial interview. I got the commercial and was on the set the next day. The only thing I've always assumed was that unlike most of the children doing commercials then, I wasn't flawlessly, dollishly pretty. I think I reminded the director or the ad guys of their kids or their kids friends.


2. Likewise, regarding a different kind of passion: how did you and Consort get together?

We met through work; he was a studio suit looking for writers for a show which went nowhere and I still thought maybe I was a TV writer. I thought he was kind, smart and terribly funny. I still do.

Book Blog Tour: Felicia

Felicia asks:

Why did you rename Daughter? I'm so used to reading about Consort and Daughter, that throughout the book I kept having to remind myself who "Alice" was. This probably speaks to my utter stupidity, since it was only repeated a few thousand times within your book, and every time it made my brain fart a little.

That was the editor. I fought to keep Consort as Consort but I understood her logic that Daughter, to people who haven't been reading the blog, might sound a little cold.

Book Blog Tour: Not the Rockefellers, redux

Not the Rockefellers asks:

I love how you write about your home and furnishings as if they are living characters...the womb like house, the giant gay amoeba couch, the bench of many objects.What would the Quinn Cummings IKEA collection look like?

Oh, the opportunities. My first instinct is that the fabric will be a dark color and hide stains. Unless, of course, you have a light-colored pet, in which case you can get the light fabric which hides stains. I'm toying with just having some pet hair woven in from the factory, to keep anyone from getting too emotional when the pets sneak up there after you go to work. I'm not putting on the unknown stains for you, though; you've got to participate at least a little.

Book Blog Tour: Quinn

I still have some questions left, but I can't get at them right now, so I'm going to ask myself a question no one has asked yet.

Quinn, what's the weirdest meal you ever ate?

Okay, but you have to remember that I was in my early twenties. I had a roommate, but because we had a house with a teeny pool and he was very social, we usually had about seventy-one people around. Some of them would bring food. Others brought pot and I assume some brought crabs, but I didn't partake of those. One Saturday afternoon, I padded into the kitchen for my first meal of the day. In the fridge was part of the sheetcake someone had brought the day before. You know the kind; it had roses and princesses. I assume they bought it for kitsch value. Or they were really high. Possibly both. Anyway, the Inner Child Quinn shrieked "I GET A ROSE AND A PRINCESS ON MY SLICE!" and I had sheetcake for breakfast. Within a minute, the frosting had coated my mouth and throat so thoroughly that it was like I was eating through a dry-cleaning bag. I drank water. I drank juice. In desperation, I drank cow's milk, which I loathe. Nothing worked. Years later, when I learned about trans-fats, I estimated I had gotten my life's worth in those rosettes and that princess. Finally I thought of something which was either going to remove the sensation or make me not care. I grabbed it from where I had hidden it from the countless house-guests.

It was single-malt Scotch. I poured a shot and sipped it. Not only did it cut the slime, it was oddly wonderful with the cake, the wood-smoke flavor a wild counterpoint to the cloying chemical obviousness. Since I have so little of a sense of taste, I'm sure it would have been completely disgusting to anyone else but I found it nothing short of delightful. No, I wasn't high. It just sounds like it.

I've never done it again. Partially because I fear someone seeing me do it and partially because I fear that like certain other events in my early twenties actually doing it again would just be a little anticlimactic and sad.

Book Blog Tour: Lisa

Lisa asks:

What is your favorite word?

Diaspora. A melodic word for a rotten thing.

What is your least favorite word?

I have a few. Slacks. Mushroom. Soup. So, it stands the reason "I need slacks to eat my mushroom soup" is the ugliest sentence I can imagine.
What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?

Quiet, solitude, knowing everyone in my life is happy and engaged without necessarily having to be in the same room with them.
What turns you off creatively, spiritually or emotionally?

Noise, chaos, confrontation. Of course, the quiet and solitude I think feeds me leaves me with nothing to write about and the bumping up against people gives me the impetus to write, so never ask me what I need, because I'm wrong.

What sound or noise do you love?

I've never thought about it before, but I like the sound of Velcro opening. I mean, I like lots of other sounds, including the sound of my kid laughing and the pets snoring (The cat has an epic snore) and Consort sleep-chuckling, but Velcro was the first one which came to mind. So it gets first billing.
What sound or noise do you hate?

The sounds of a car accident. Even when it's faked for a movie, i want to run from the room screaming. Probably comes from having been a participant in that sound in real life once too often.
What is your favorite curse word?

It is a compound word and it involves the word "Rat." It's a little off the main drag, as far as obscenities go, but I like it.
What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?

On some level, I feel as if I'm still attempting the career I have, so I'm loathe to add a new learning curve, even theoretically.

What profession would you not like to do?

Meat packer. Telephone solicitor. Secretary of the Treasury.
If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

"Don't worry, we know you tried your best. We're going to let you work at the cat-rescue place up here."

Book Blog Tour: Antique Mommy

Antique Mommy asked and I answered. Come along! Not only did she ask some lovely and sparkly questions, she's doing a Quinn book giveaway contest.

Blog Book Tour: The Dog Lived

The Dog Lived asked. I answered. I apologize to beagles.

Www.thedoglived.blogspot.com

Blog Book Tour: Miss Cavendish

Click on title to link.

Miss Cavendish asks; I answer. Learn why I think I have green eyes.

Blog Book Tour: NY's Funniest Rabbi

Rabbi Neil Fleischmann asked, I answered. I explain why I (nearly always) work clean.

Blog Book Tour: Mel

Mel asks: The gray flannel pants. Do you still own them? Do you still wear them? http://qcreport.blogspot.com/2006/10/woman-in-gray-flannel-pants.htmlWhat are you reading now? What did you read last? What's up next?

First, the pants. I took them out to wear them one bright winter day this year and the sunlight hit them just right and I flinched at the brightness. Oh, they are much more worn and shiny than I thought! I will not wear them again, I am both sad and relieved to say. But I have yet to give them away because I simultaneously believe that a) They're too shiny to give away and expect someone to wear and b) They aren't that bad and maybe I'll wear them next fall. It's like I'm trying to get a mental disease named after me or something.

What am I reading now? I just finished The Story of a Marriage, which is small and quiet and wonderful. If you were ever completely certain that you were doing the right thing, I suggest you page through Mistakes were Made, But not By Me. I read Jen Lancaster's new book, which is the usual Lancastrian lively romp and entertaining company. And I keep skimming through books written ostensibly for middle-schoolers, because I want to check them out before the kid does because not all the content is appropriate. But I'm not sure that counts as reading as much as policing. Next? I think I'm going to drag out Miss Wharton, because it's hot and she's very cooling.

Blog Book Tour: Michaele

Michaele (she needs an accent mark, but isn't getting it because it's not my usual computer) asks: My question is....was all the hard work worth it? I mean, when you finally got your book in your hand was it "Yay!" or "Eh."

Funny you would ask that because when Brenda the editor called to say "EXPECT THE BOOK IN YOUR MAILBOX TOMORROW!" I was all "YEAH!" because isn't one supposed to be? And it arrived and I opened the box and Consort was a poster child for "YEAH!" and the kid was "YEAH!" and the dog was "YEAH!" and the cat and I were "Well." First, there is my perverse need to feel the opposite of whatever the prevailing emotion is. But I also think it's something like the answer former Communist leader Zhou en Lai gave when asked about the impact of the French Revolution of 1789; It's too soon to tell.

Blog Book Tour: The Parks Farm

The Parks Farm asks and I answer. Do I prefer quality or quantity? Well, you're just going to have to read it.

Blog Book Tour: Spleeness

Spleeness asks and I answer. Come find out my favorite word.

Blog Book Tour: Maternal Spark

I'm on Maternal Spark where I talk about guilt and also dodge-ball.

Blog Book Tour: Rachael and Deb

Rachael asks:

What ever happened with the Latin? I enjoyed your take on the Oxford series (if I recall correctly), perhaps especially because I didn't enjoy it myself.


and Deb asks:

As much as I love the cat stories (I've retold the one with the cat and Daughter's ponytail holders in the middle of the night countless times), I too loved the "Cranky Roman Family" blogs. Might there be more in the future?

The Cranky Roman Family appreciates your interest. Actually, they'd probably have you flogged or fed to their stewing eels, but let's pretend they'd like the attention. I had no idea anyone remembered those blogs and maybe now that enough time has past for me to forget what it's like to fight a wild pack of declensions, I'll do a couple again.

Blog Book Tour: Quiet Elegance

Come to Quiet Elegance and learn how my book causes other books to run amok.

Blog Book Tour: NJaneHair

NJaneHair asks:

I have a long commute between work and home, and rely on audiobooks (particularly audible.com) to keep up with my 'reading'. I would love to 'listen' to your book. Has this form of publication been given any consideration?

Oh, I love Audible.com. And I hate long commutes. And I wish I was going to be easing your journey any time soon, but I think first books are hardly ever audio books. But I had such a good time reading a story at Vroman's out here in Los Angeles that I'm trying to figure out a way to read some more stories in public.

Blog Book Tour: M Denise C

Come visit me over at M Denise C ; you'll learn about one of my phobias!

Blog Book Tour: Judy

Judy asks:

Now that you are established as an author, is your publisher interested in another book lifted directly from your blog?

Because I am very, very lazy, I had thought the first book was going to be lifted directly from the blog, and this made me happy. But then I spoke to my editor and learned that books lifted directly from blog don't sell as well, what with already being available for free, and my publishers were a little more excited about new material than I was. This was annoying to me, as I felt I had pretty much blathered anything worth blathering already. Luckily, I had a year to cough up some more ruminations. Very little of this book has seen the light of day prior to this.

Blog Book Tour: Rebecca

Rebecca asks:

When you think of all the meanings of toast, which is your favorite? And why?

First, I'd like to note that "Toast" is a very euphonic word. The soft "T," the brief aimless jaunt through the long "O" sound, and then a soft but conclusive "ST" to take us out.

Maybe it's the morning, but I knew I couldn't think of all the definitions for toast, so I asked the inexaustible Google and here's what I got:

slices of bread that have been toasted
a celebrity who receives much acclaim and attention; "he was the toast of the town"
crispen: make brown and crisp by heating; "toast bread"; "crisp potatoes"
goner: a person in desperate straits; someone doomed; "I'm a goner if this plan doesn't work"; "one mistake and you're toast"
propose a toast to; "Let us toast the birthday girl!"; "Let's drink to the New Year"
pledge: a drink in honor of or to the health of a person or event

This morning, right now, I'd say my favorite meaning for the word toast is the pledging, drinking in honor of one. No particular reason, except maybe that I saw HBO's "Grey Gardens" last night and Drew Barrymore's performance deserved many toasts.

Blog Book Tour: The Writers Dog

Come and read my interview at http://thewritersdog.blogspot.com/. I mention another one of my cringeworthy injuries!

Blog Book Tour: Claire

Claire asks:

Do you keep in touch with people you once acted with?

Not really, but it's nothing against the actors with whom I worked, most of whom were great eggs. First, I rarely keep in touch with anyone. If someone is in my life, it's because every three months or so they call me and say "Now, Quinn, would be a good time for us to see each other." And I say something like "Oh, has it been three months?" and they say "Yes," and we arrange to have tea. I'm weird and solitary and many friendships have died unnoticed and unlamented at my metaphorical gate. Also, I was a kid when I was acting and the other actors were adults. In my non-working hours, wanted to read, play with my pets and drink Tom Collins mix (No alcohol, just the mixer. I loved it). They had other plans.

Blog Book Tour: Kathryn

Kathryn asks:

Let's start with restaurant toast. I prefer to put butter on my own toast. It may be a genetic trait, but so be it. Why do waitpeople have such a problem with that? You can not tell me that some chef in the back is going to throw a pot across the room or invoke a Gordon Ramsey snit fit because I prefer to butter my own toast.

I think it might be about habits and being forced to consider something you do unconsciously (buttering toast before you bring it into the dining room) and making it conscious. Watch what happens to a waiter's head if you interrupt them to ask a question when they are reciting the daily specials. Many appear to have to replay the first part again nonverbally before they can go on. I've never had a butter issue with the waitstaff except that there isn't enough. Bring me more. No, really. More. Yeah, judge me and come visit me after the cardiologist has to Roto-Rooter my aorta.

Now, on to home toast. Twice through the toaster on the light setting. Period. Paragraph. End of discussion. Unless you wish to discuss it. Oh, unless the toast is leftover pound cake. Once through will do it.

I like it a tick darker than light. Then again, as I have noted, I have virtually no sense of taste and it's nearly all texture for me, and beige toast doesn't have enough range to delight me. I need to occasional tobacco-colored bit to fight back as I'm biting down. Surprisingly, I have no opinions on leftover pound cake as a toast. However, I plan to have several opinions just as soon as I can get my hands on a pound cake and some quiet time.

By the way, I walked straight into a board today while telling a friend about the wonderful time I had reading your book. I couldn't stop laughing long enough to decide if I was hurt or not (I was not), so kept on with my story.

This proves what I have always suspected; I'm contagious. If you start romanticizing buying a house with questionable infrastructure and toying with cutting your own hair, my work is complete.