I may as well let you know I’m posting this on my blog - I’ve been too busy this week to be any kind of creative.

I’ve a job. Or two. I find myself once again in government. This time for a non profit. I hadn’t planned on taking anything up. But it suits my background to a ridiculous ‘T’. And besides, I need routine. Schedule. Something to add discipline to my undisciplined days. Lady of Leisure soon gets old.

Before you get too excited and begin berating me for ‘giving up’ - the position is part time and flexible btw - I’ve also got a writing gig. Proper, paid and professional. It’s academic. Not creative. Think Stephen Hawking and his singularities over Melissa Bank and her Wonder Spot. I’ll need to brush up on sounding intelligent. I once pulled the look off quite well, you know.

The rewrites are progressing slower than I had hoped. But they’re progressing. So that’s something … I suppose. I’ve designed two more websites. Beautiful in their simplicity. Methinks. Pink and pretty. The both of them. Are there Barbies in Pakistan? My first solo photography job went well. The next - already booked - should go better. Now, if I could only learn to cook. To create.

Good grief Charlie Brown! Don’t agree to marry the man until you’ve met him. He could be frightful to look at. And boring. And a momma’s boy. Momma’s boys never make good husbands. I defy anyone to say they do. As for the dress: I say if he doesn’t like Derek Lam, abscond to The West. I have a brother who’s almost single. You wont like him - he thinks $1000 handbags are wasteful - but I’ll introduce you anyway.

Tea for two. Champagne for four. Sounds like a plan. I miss our luncheons. Kiss the family, but not the cousin with the droopy eye, and enjoy the weather. Bring me back an elephant. And a candlestick.

Much love.

Buffy

My mom thinks I’m awful, because I’m getting ready to write about Alex the Ex. “How can you do that to him?”

Him is the dark eyed European in the other room. “Because he’s not the jealous type,” I tell her. “And because the things I have to say about Alex could be said in front of a two year old.” I’d say them in Greek, of course. And I’d whisper certain parts…but I’d say them all the same.

He doesn’t like to be mentioned much on the blog. Prefers his privacy. “I’m not really keen on having my face plastered all over the net.” I’m hearing this now. As I write.

But he’s the Stedman to my Oprah. The Carl to my Dolly. The Peanut Butter to my Jelly. And every now and then, I like to brag about it.

Here he sits through six hours of home videos circa “High School Hair Days” at my grandparents house in Iaeger, West Virginia. “It’s like a movie set,” he says every time we pull into the dusty little coal town. And he’s not talking about the videos.

I’ve just been tagged by DevilWoman. I don’t usually play, but DW is hilarious and I’m a huge list maker. Also, I’m feeling rather aggressive today; and I’ve found it’s best not to write memoir type entries when in the throws of anger. Or restless irritation. So here we are. Quirks and things. A tag.

1. I can’t stand for anyone to touch my face. If they do, even accidentally, even during, say, a kiss..I have to wash it immediately. I carry around facial wipes and rose oil in case of emergency.

2. I hate little tiny close together circles. I have to close my eyes and grimace and ’shake it out’ any time I see them. Otherwise, they make me sick.

3. I always eat dessert before the main course because I don’t like the taste of ’sweet’ on my tongue. I once got fat following cheese cake with scotch eggs. I wasn’t even pregnant.

4. Sometimes, when I start talking I forget what I’m saying, but my mouth keeps going anyway.

5. I must finish drinks in an even number of sips, and meals in an even number of bites. I use to have to take an even number of steps … but I’m over that now.

6. If I don’t get 9 hours of sleep I go loopy. For real. It’s a condition. I think. I seldom get those 9 hours. Thus my constant state.

7. I like to put egg whites, raw and organic, on my face at night. Not all night. Just AT night. Because they make my skin look fabulous, they’re better than collagen and they’re hypoallergenic. They’re also much cheaper than Crème de la Mer.

p.s
Devilwoman, I like monkeys too. But that’s another quirk..

“Everywhere I go, I’m asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them….”

–Flannery O’Connor

Laura was mean and pugnacious. Not the way most children are. She didn’t play practical jokes on busybody aunts or pull the ears of annoying cousins like I sometimes did. She told families of their father’s indiscretions and then wondered aloud in other people’s company why the children were so ugly and the mothers so dim. She also stole my bike.

Carol was fat. A big lopsided ball of flesh with little beady eyes and bad skin. Laura said too much. Carol didn’t say enough. She kept hush when the former blamed the drowning of a neighbour’s cat on Dewey, even though she saw her sister put the animal into a plastic bag and throw it in the creek. Carol ate crawdads. Raw.

Alice had red hair. Redder than her siblings. She wore it protruding from either side of her head in imaginative cartoon style pigtails. There was nothing else remarkable about her.

Dewey said if I didn’t have anything else to be thankful for, I ought to be thankful I hadn’t come from that bunch. I’d be a fat, copper-topped, bike thief and wouldn’t that be as bad as it got.

Things being what they were, he said, I was a right attractive kid. Couldn’t help but be’¦.falling from the same tree as he.

I let him say it. Because I reckoned he was right.

I’ve just finished watching The Holiday. Kate Winslet is lovely. But I can’t bring myself to care for Cameron Diaz and I find Jude Law incredibly pompous and irritating - in spite of that rather touching display of affection in his penultimate scene. I would have turned it off, Winslet notwithstanding, were it not for this. Huge chunks of the film bore a striking resemblance to my life. The good, the bad and the ugly (Eli Wallach pun intended).

I remember all too well the pivotal breakdown. The trying to cope with not having the relationship I thought I needed. Leaving my own country, on a whim, to clear my head in another. Falling madly, deeply. On a two week holiday. With a country and a man.

I was Cameron without the fancy home. Driving very badly on the wrong side of the road and sleeping in a cottage lined by cobbled streets. An accidental meeting with a handsome foreigner. Yup. Me too.

And Kate, who spent three years loving a man who didn’t love her back. Who didn’t want her to stay but wouldn’t let her go either. More me.

But that’s another story.

Yesterday I checked that email address I never check - and I’m glad of it. Amidst all the annoying chain letters, the phentermine and porn spam, I had a note from the lovely Dina.

The food blogess and publishing girl sent me an email re: Gather.com’s First Chapters Writing Competition. It’s being promoted as something like American Idol for the Writer. The social networking site is teaming up with Touchstone/Simon & Schuster to look for unpublished authors - with full length commercial-fiction manuscripts. The contest goes something like this…

The first three chapters will be posted online, one at a time, where the Gather.com community will vote for their favourite. The manuscripts still remaining after three elimination rounds (one for each chapter) will be judged by a panel of industry big wigs including Carolyn K. Reidy, President of the Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group; Mark Gompertz, Executive Vice President & Publisher of Touchstone Books and George Jones, Borders Group CEO.

The winner will receive a publishing contract with Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, a $5,000 cash prize from Gather.com and promotion and distribution by Borders.

All you writerly people, what do you think? Anyone fancy it?

My turn. Because Oprah said to…

If you really knew me, you would know I think I’m fat. Not just fat. Obese. Morbidly so. I have since I was nine.

I sometimes see photos of myself and think “No way that’s me. That person looks normal. Not like Jabba the Hut. Not like me.”

I’ve always been this way. I’ve always not liked people looking at me. People seeing me. Because when you’re 10 and an adult laughs at you and calls you BOSS HOGG (You know, Jefferson Davis) you think everyone else is gonna do the same. You automatically assume you’re fat. Even though you’re not.

My father, once or twice removed - I’ve never understood how ‘removals’ work - use to throw the lovely label at me. BOSS HOGG. ‘Jaws’ was another. I had chubby cheeks. Reeeally chubby cheeks. So I guess it stood to reason I’d like a nickname like Jaws.

I was also called BUFORD - after Jackie Gleason’s Buford T. Justice character in Smokey and the Bandit. My father didn’t call me that. Not originally. That one started with someone who didn’t know any better - my youngest brother. But my father laughed whenever he said it, and everyone knows when you laugh at something a five year old does it just encourages them to do it again.

Who knows. Maybe he really thought I was fat - not the brother, the other. I mean, he’s pretty little himself. One hundred and forty pounds was a healthy weight for him, a grown man. So maybe 72 on a 10 year old girl looked a little on the large side.

Or maybe it was because I was bigger than certain stupid cousins. But certain stupid cousins were already throwing up in the toilets … and they weren’t 5′4. I was. And I had those chubby cheeks. Skin and bones everywhere else. I realise that now, looking at other children. The same age. The same size. Who I’d call skinny.

“I thought I was fat.” I said to my mother a few years ago. “What? You were so thin, you looked sickly sometimes.” Is what she said to me.

Maybe someone should have told my father.

My sister loves Oprah. So she’ll appreciate my attempt here. I was watching the talk show goddess the other day. She had Lisa Ling on discussing a ‘Mean Girls’ style intervention exercise they did with some city high school. Where the kids sat around and talked about their feelings and how no one really knew them and how hurt they were by those around them on a daily basis.

Oprah asked this question: “How would YOU finish this sentence: If you really knew me, you would know….”

The idea is to lay it all bare and reveal the part of yourself you keep hid from others because you fear rejection, scorn, humiliation etc. That one thing you most fear people knowing about you. I don’t mean something like ‘I robbed a liquor store when I was five’. I’m talking more personal. More INNER YOU. For example, one kid revealed this: ‘Everyone thinks my life is so easy but they don’t know I spend every evening taking care of my sick mother.’

That sexy European I carry around with me laughs and cringes when he hears something like this. “Americans are soooo cheesy” he says. But I don’t care. I wanna try it - and I’ll post mine in a few days. You don’t have to leave your real name or any link. But I’d like to know… what part of you do YOU keep hidden. How would YOU finish this sentence.

“If you really knew me, you would know…”