I can’t believe it’s a whole new year already! I’m writing this with a heating pad on my stomach and a pillow over that and my laptop on the pillow. I guess I will personally always remember 2007 as The Year That They Took Out My Right Ovary and Burned Off All My Endometriosis, Which By The Way Still Really Hurts.
I think we can all agree 2007 was a weird year. It certainly ended super sadly. I was reading a magazine article about Benazir Bhutto the night before she was killed (here’s a link). The article, which included references to Benazir’s feisty fourteen-year-old daughter, made Benazir feel like someone you might know.
I remember finishing the magazine and saving it. I don’t know why now. I just remember thinking, I need to hold onto this article. I might need it someday.
Then He Who Shall Not Be Named In This Blog woke me up the next morning and said, “I have some bad news” (I thought his cat, Slutty McSlut-a-Slut, had been hit by a car).
It took me a long time to realize what he was saying, since I’d just been reading about Benazir the night before, and she still seemed so alive to me.
My novels are really where I write about the things I feel passionately (believe it or not), so I’m going to write more about this in a book, not here, though it won’t come out as A Tribute To Benazir, of course, but as something else, and you probably won’t recognize it. It’s weird to be an author who blogs.
As the New Yorker recently put it in this somewhat entertaining article on diaries and the people who keep them, blogs are just blather (I don’t agree that all of them are, of course. But I can guarantee all novelists save what they consider to be their best work for their books).
Fortunately 2007 gave us a lot to feel good about, as well, so we aren’t totally bereft going into 2008. Here are some notably cheerful things that I, at least, enjoyed during the year (one of those things was meeting some of you during my various book tours)!
In case you missed them, now you, too, can start off 2008 on a happy note:
There’s a new Jeannie Tate, Soccer Mom, episode! And it might be the funniest one ever…click on Episode 4, the Oprah one! (Thanks, Liz, for pointing it out!)
Have you checked out the lounge pants at Anthropologie?
Oh my God, I’ve been living in mine.
And granted I had surgery three weeks ago, but they are so super cozy! I love them so much…and yes, I do want to marry them.
Drama of the band the Switchblade Kittens wrote to let me know I can get these Betsey Johnson PJs half off at all Victoria’s Secrets stores RIGHT NOW.
And that they’re divine (I concur, which means agree).
Don’t forget one of my favorite books from ’07, Susan Juby’s Another Kind of Cowboy, which isn’t about cowboys at all, but about a friendship between a snooty prep school girl (yes! There’s a boarding school in it!) and a boy who are both crazy for horses and a form of riding called dressage.
Another Kind of Cowboy is available in the US now and you’ve GOT to get your hands on a copy before it gets banned in your school because, well, it’s going to. That’s all I’m going to say.
Both my friends Jennifer and Beth are addicted to the A&E show Intervention, and they got me addicted. Seriously, you HAVE to watch it. It’s not making a spectacle of people with addiction, the show really tries to help, even sometimes “breaking through the fourth wall” as a fellow fan said to me the other day, and calling 911 when necessary. I have been through an intervention before with my dad, so you would think I wouldn’t want to sit around and watch someone else’s intervention because it would be too painful for me. BUT IT’S SO NOT.
A&E’s series Intervention features drug, alcohol, sex, and gambling addicts, as well as people with eating disorders
Anyway, the past few nights we’ve been going to cocktail parties where people were discussing super intellectual things like art and Gore Vidal, and then they’d turn to me, and I’d just be like, “Have you seen Intervention? Did you see the one with Tina, the Vicodin addicted housewife?”
It’s sad, really. I’m the one who needs an intervention…from Intervention.
Okay, I’m not just obsessed with Intervention. I also love Bahlsen Hit Cocoa Sandwich cookies.
They’re crazy fattening and bad for you, but the chocolate inside tastes like real chocolate frosting, and the cookie part is crisp and light…more tea biscuit-ish than cookie-ish, so you don’t get that cloying cookie taste which can be overwhelming (but because it’s like a biscuit, they often crumble in the package so shake before you buy, and if you hear a lot of rattling, choose a different package). You can buy them in most grocery stores and delis, and if that fails, you can get them online at…where else? Amazon. But I wouldn’t buy them online due to the aforementioned crumbling problem.
Jezebel has been running these tributes to YA books we loved as kids, and I especially adored this one to Lois Duncan’s Summer of Fear.
I loved this book so much—I loved all Lois Duncan, really, especially A Gift of Magic—but I remember this one (only I don’t remember it being quite the way it sounds in this description). You have to check out all the Jezebel entries, they’re so fab. This is an example of a blog that’s not blather.
But wait, there’s more!
I saw some movies! I saw Juno, and, what the heck, I liked it okay (how’s that for a ringing endorsement? And yes, I’m sick of screenwriters using pregnancy as a plot device, but, in deference to my fellow bloggers, I fail to see how either Knocked Up or Juno have some kind of anti-feminist political agenda. I’m pretty sure they want nothing from you at all except your love, your ten dollars and fifty cents at the ticket booth…and your screenwriters guild vote at the Oscars…I mean, if you’re me).
I also saw Ghost Rider.
BEST MOVIE OF ’07. Why has no one thought of lighting Nicholas Cage’s head on fire before?
I finally saw Music and Lyrics all the way through, too. All I have to say about that is Pop! Goes My Heart.
I know everyone else saw these movies ages ago. Shut up. I want to see new movies. I do! I just can’t sit up for very long at a time.
Finally, since so many of you enjoyed the Gilbert and Sullivan Baby Got Back clip I put on here last time, I thought you’d like this (if you didn’t see it on the news already). All I can say about these two is, when you have that good a sense of humor, nothing can split you up.
Oh, and did you see the Cloverfield trailer during Gossip Girl? I can’t wait to see this.
And I don’t know who would make something like this, taking advantage of babies and poking fun of the Spears family (two things my mom told me to stop doing), but I knew the minute I saw this I had to put it on my site, so you could join me….
…laughing helplessly and wishing you had thought of it first.
Thanks for helping to make Princess Mia debut at number 9 on the NYTimes bestseller series list! She couldn’t have done it without you!
Happy New Year!
More later.
Much love,
Meg
