Full of Pique

It was one of those mornings. I had to get up at before the crack of dawn, in order to catch an early train, because I had to get to a dentist appointment at 8:00, because on Monday, I went to the same dentist (at 8 am, same early train, same dark arising) and was told that I had a tiny little cavity. I can't remember the last time I had a cavity. Ancient fillings falling apart, leading to root canals and crowns? Sure. Tiny little newborn cavities? Blech.

On the train, the accursed early train, I discovered that I'd left my wallet home. My wallet, with my monthly train ticket, and my flex account credit card. So I got a bill from the conductor, which he claimed they will waive when I whine at customer service with my actual ticket in hand, but I'm going to have to whine nicely at the conductor on the train home so that I don't get a second bill. I did, however, get a belly laugh out of the dentist's assistant when I told him that I'd left my wallet home and that "of course, I won't be able to pay you". He shrugged, which is one of the reasons I adore him.

My general sense of pique at the ill start to my day was thoroughly exacerbated by the plethora of infuriating stories in the good grey lady, like the one about the trust fund dilettante whose neighbors don't like that she's inviting artists to her eight acre estate in suburban Connecticut. Read it, the whole thing. It's full of gag-inducing gems, ranging from "littered with Mr. Zorn’s charcoal sketches, including one that bore the digestive imprint of a chicken" to "Home-schooled until the age of 14, when her mother, Euphemia Brock Slater, a Mayflower descendant, died from complications of rheumatic fever..."

Then there was the front page article about the dare-devil idiots swinging from natural rock arches out in Moab, UT.

Agency officials say they are always surprised by how fast extreme sports evolve around them. One day, they got a call that someone had built a human catapult from the top of a plateau. They then realized they had no rules about human catapults, for or against.

Right - there are no rules about human catapults because normal human beings never dreamed that anyone would try such a thing outside of a circus!

But the piece that really got me frothing at the mouth was the one about Under Armour's new ad campaign. It's geared towards women, and it showcases a ballet dancer. Great! But:

Advertising for Under Armour tends to feature elite athletes competing on fields, but to promote its women’s line the athletic apparel brand has a new commercial starring a nonathlete....Under Armour says Ms. [Missy] Copeland is the first nonathlete with whom it has signed an advertising contract.

Sputter, sputter, sputter.

What neither Under Armour nor its ad agency (and perhaps the New York Times too) realize is that ballet dancers are passionate, disciplined, fierce ATHLETES. To call this campaign one that uses a "non-athlete" is appallingly insensitive. Just because they're not playing a game in which someone loses and someone else wins, doesn't make them not athletes.

And lest you want to quibble, ask an orthopedist, or read the Merriam-Webster definition of athlete:

ath·lete
noun \ˈath-ˌlēt, ÷ˈa-thə-ˌlēt\

: a person who is trained in or good at sports, games, or exercises that require physical skill and strength

Ballet dancer = athlete. No question.

Tomorrow, I plan to wake up at a normal hour and I hope to be not infuriated by anything I read in the paper.

When The Fat Lady Sings, It's About Health Insurance

If you are a New Yorker, or an opera aficionado, or a follower of all things union, you probably know that the Metropolitan Opera is on the cusp of a possible lockout: "The contracts for 15 unions at the Met expire on Thursday night."

But here's the little thing in this big sad story that gobsmacks me:

The Met sent its workers a memo last week saying that in the event of a lockout, unionized workers covered by the Met would lose their health insurance, and that paying for insurance under the federal Cobra law would cost $1,255 a month for individuals and $2,793 a month for families.

What the hell kind of fancy pants insurance costs $1,255 for an individual? That's $15,060 a year.

The insurance we have in my office is a "bronze" plan with a fairly high deductible and an out-of-pocket maximum of $6,250. The trade-off for the high deductible and out-of-pocket, is a fairly low premium, of $434.98 per month, which comes to $5,219.76 each year. If you add the annual premium to the out-of-pocket limit, you get a total of $11,469.76 per year. That's $3500 less a year than the Met is paying for individuals. And if I'm healthy and don't go to the doctor beyond my annual physical (which is covered outside of the deductible), I'm not going to invoke any of that OOP - so my overall cost is only the cost of the premium.

Some months ago, I was helping a friend of a friend navigate through the NYS health insurance exchange. What I realized then is that the relationship between premiums and out-of-pocket limits was such that if you are in a situation where you need to use all of the insurance, you're going to pay about the same amount of money no matter what "metal level" plan you pick - that the annual premium plus the out-of-pocket maximum was almost the same for any of the plans. By choosing a bronze plan, you'll have a lower monthly cost but you could have cost spikes through the year as you actually incur medical expenses. Choosing the platinum plan bumps up your monthly fixed costs, but mitigates any later incurred expenses.

You know how your utility company offers "budget billing", where they estimate your annual electric bill and divide it by twelve so you pay the same amount every month? There's more chance associated with a month to month electric bill: OMG I had to run the A/C 24/7 in July and ouch! The platinum plans are sort of like your electric companies budget billing, the bronze plan is like taking your chances and knowing that the A/C is going to run up your summer electric bill.

And here's what's crazy: if you're employed, you don't have any choice! You can get lucky and work for an employer like the Met, where the employer is probably picking up a big chunk of that $15,060 each year and the employees are probably paying next to nothing for their actually incurred health expenses. Or you can work for an office like mine - where the office pays 100% of our premium and we're on our own after that. But really, why should it be employer based? Health insurance ought to be severed from employment.

Why should you have to pay for insurance with post-tax dollars if you work for yourself or for a small company that doesn’t offer insurance, but with pre-tax dollars if you work for a larger company? Why should your employer’s preferences — including, as they do now, their preferences on what kind of birth control you should use — be more important than your own? And why should your insurance have to change if you get a new job?

What are we going to do to make that happen?

Camp: It's all fun and games, until someone ends up in the clink.

I am beginning to wonder why we never sent the kid to camp before. The first day, there was the horse with the doily on its head. Over the weekend, we got a picture of her jumping! Of course, she was jumping over rails without a horse, but hey! (Or is that hay?)

Hey kid, where's your horse?

I think, though, the letters home may be even better than the pictures. Letter #1: I'm having the best time at camp. Letter #2: Daddy, remember those Tastykakes you bought me? They were confiscated because of "mice". Letter #3:

If you can't read that, it says:

Dear Mommy and Daddy,
Please send poker chips! Our bunk
all made businesses, and I'm
the casino, and we need some chips.
Love,
Miranda

POKER CHIPS.

Horses. Gambling. What's next, rum running?

You'll be happy to know that no poker chips were shipped off to the wilds, given that the letter arrived Monday and we pick her up on Friday. Mama ain't got time to FedEx no poker chips.

A Rhetorical Pedantic Question

Today, let's complain about sizes. Oh, not the usual bit about how a size 12 dress isn't what it used to be, and size 000 is the new vanity waif size.

No, shoe sizes. Back in the day, like before I had that child of mine, I wore a size 10 shoe. I became resigned to the fact that it was impossible to buy shoes on sale, because they stocked fewer of the big (and tiny) sizes so by the time shoes were on sale, only the mid range, common sizes were left. Gradually, my feet crept up in size (thank you pregnancy and old age), and now they're a comfortable 11. Happily, I'm not the only one, so where it used to be that shoes ran up to size 10 and stopped, it's pretty common to find an 11 these days.

But a couple of weeks ago, I put on my size 11, purchased after childbirth, barely worn, Keen hiking boots, and groaned. Too small, toes hitting the end of the shoe. Not at all good, given that I need them for our upcoming vacation.

I looked carefully at the label, and noticed that they're marked US-W 11 / Euro 42. Huh, I thought, my Danskos are a 43 - I thought Euro 43 was US-W 11. So I started looking online for boots in a Euro 43, and ended up ordering two pairs from Zappos (free return shipping FTW).

The first pair is marked US-W 11 / US-M 10 / Euro 43:

The second pair is marked US-M 10 / Euro 44:

So - the three pairs of boots marked with three different Euro sizes, but two are the "same" women's size, and two are the "same" men's size.

In other words, there is absolutely no rhyme or reason to shoe sizes either. WHY IS THAT? WHY CAN'T THINGS BE STANDARDIZED? An inch is an inch, a kilogram is a kilogram. How hard would it be to standardize shoe and clothing sizes?

Oh, and I ended up with the Merrell boots - in a men's size 10. My next pair of hiking boots are going to be from the clown shoe department. My 10 year daughter is already wearing a woman's 7 or 7 1/2 shoe; I told her that she was going to be shopping for shoes in the drag queen department when she's full grown.

I hope I haven't scarred her for life.

Nomenclature

The little girl is off at sleepaway camp for ten days. It's the first time she's been away from us like this, for this long. Ten days of no "get out of bed", "eat your dinner", "brush your teeth", "read a book". Ten days of no snuggles and no Doctor Who marathons, no broad conversations at the breakfast table about religion and the cosmos, no cardboard boxes being cut up in the living room and reassembled into doll school classrooms and dormitories and furniture.

Instead, there's a trickle of random photos sent out by the camp, mostly out of focus.

Why is the horse wearing a doily‽‽‽

I, dutiful mother, have been sending mail, old-style mail with stamps. A postcard of NYC: "Wish you were here"! A photo of the cat sandwiched between the hamster cages. A quote from Maya Angelou: "Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better."

She, my small person, she calls me Mommy or Mama or Mom. And yet, every single time I sign one of those little notes to her, I wonder what to write. Am I Mom? Should I sign it with "Mom"? Ten and a half years into being her mother, signing a postcard with "Mom" feels otherworldly, not right, not me.

I fudge. The "M" is legible, the rest could be anything. She can call me anything, but my name is still my name.

Trip Planning

We are working on plans for our summer adventure, making lists and buying new hiking boots.

I, however, have my priorities.

One needs coffee for breakfast, so I am eyeing this cunning thermal stainless-steel French press:

And one needs wine with dinner, so I impulse bought one of these plastic wine glasses with an unscrewable stem:

Of course, we're going to Utah, where caffeine and alcohol are verboten, so I'm not sure how practical either of these will turn out to be.

Perfect, in a fruits and vegetables kind of way

I think it was the perfect weekend.

The weather was glorious.

There were strawberries and raspberries to be picked.

And some of them got sidetracked into a jar of brandy, for brandied fruits for Christmas, because one likes to think ahead.

The girl splashed around in the stream, horsing around on a Sno-Tube because we don't have any water floaties. She enlisted me: I tied a length of rope on with a bowline because I still know some knots and then she'd float through the rapids so I could haul her back upstream.

On the way home, we detoured past a farm stand that was rumored to have corn, first of the season corn. And they did, and it was good.

And there were fresh shell peas, and local bing cherries.

And because we were so out of the way, we detoured further, past some wonderful ice-cream in Hudson. I had fig. I would have fig every day if I could.

And when we got home, I added fresh bing cherries to the strawberry/raspberry/brandy concoction.

And we ate dinner on the back deck - corn, and peas with a little chiffonade of mint (they sang, really they just sang, those minted peas), and weisswurst procured at the Veteran Pork Store, in yet another detour. And while we were eating, the girl noticed that the patio tomato in the big pot on the deck had produced fruit. The first tomatoes of the season.

Corn, tomatoes, strawberries. Raspberries, cherries, peas. It's a good time of year for eating. And swimming. And basking in the sunlight. And walking barefoot on the grass.

Perfect, even.

Our Under Lobby

I have been walking by this sign for a week or so, and I find it oddly and head-scratchingly charming.

Pardon our
Appearance the lobby
In under renovation.

It's like some disjointed found poetry, or an ID test where you have to rearrange the words to make a coherent sentence.

Pardon our appearance in the lobby under renovation?  No.

Pardon our appearance under renovation in the lobby? No.

Aha!!

Pardon the appearance in our under renovation lobby.

"Eggs are very beautiful cells"

My father-in-law enjoys "collecting" names, wherein the name of the person is somehow indicative of their profession.

I found a doozy today, one Dieter Egli. Dr. Egli is a research scientist, at the New York Stem Cell Foundation, and he appeared in today's New York Times article on "three parent IVF", wherein bits are taken out of one egg and transferred to another.

Egli - doing research on eggs. Perfect, no?

And, in a fabulous coincidence, a colleague of Dr. Egli's at the New York Stem Cell Foundation is one Kevin Eggan, PhD.

Egli and Eggan, doing research on eggs. Could it get better? I don't think so.

Nineteen

Because we are complicated, our wedding invitation was idiosyncratic. Letterpress, with hand applied watercolor to pick out the green in the intertwined letters. And a dictionary definition of marriage: "the combination of the king and queen of the same suit, as in pinochle".

Needless to say, we did not include a preprinted RSVP card, because I believe that everyone ought to know how to respond, properly, to an invitation (and, furthermore, that thank you notes are to be hand-written and put in the mail).

My absolute favorite response was from a dear, crusty, across-the-street neighbor. If memory serves, it was the first response we got, and it was perfect.

Happy nineteenth anniversary, dear.

Not. One. More.

After the horror of last week's shooting in Santa Barbara, and the wrenching statement by Richard Martinez, the father of one of the victims, I used the online tool provided by Every Town For Gun Safety and sent postcards to my elected officials. It was oddly unsatisfying though; both of my senators, and my representative, are supporters of gun control. What I really wanted to do was send a postcard to the ones that need swaying. I looked for a template for a printable postcard, and when I couldn't find one, I made one. (Actually, I whined and got my husband to do the heavy lifting; I'm not so good in inDesign.)

And then I spent part of my sick day today in bed, addressing postcards to the likes of Senator Jeff Flake and Senator Kelly Ayotte and Senator Marco Rubio. (Action, even non-physical activity from the confines of your bed nest, is good for the sick person's soul.)

Just in case you too are spurred to action, here's my template. It'll print 4 up on Avery postcards (I used #8387), but you could also do it on card stock and cut the sheets into four postcards after printing. It's a two page pdf - to print front and back. Fill in your name/address on the left (or use one of the return address stickers you get when the March of Dimes asks you for a donation). (If I'd been really clever, I'd have made it a fill-in-able pdf. But I didn't.) Find a list of all of the senators. Fill in the senator's name on the top line on the right, with the office number and building on the second line. Add a 34 cent stamp.

Be active. Say to yourself "not one more". Make the world a better place.

---

To recap:
Postcard template
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9CKcFnTfUSibmxZZVJUaVFueU0/edit?usp=sharing

Senators of the 113th Congress
http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

On-line Tool to Send Postcards to YOUR 2 senators and 1 representative
http://act.everytown.org/sign/NotOneMore/

Maya Angelou: But still, like dust, I'll rise.

I live lightly in the Twitterverse. I dabble from time to time, but I tend to follow and interact with people I know; I don't really follow celebrities. So, I had no idea that Maya Angelou was a tweeter, until I saw that she'd died, yesterday.

Curious, I scrolled through her recent tweets, and stopped, dumbstruck at this one. What a sentiment from a woman not long for this world.

I have a certain way of being in this world, and I shall not, I shall not be moved.
— Maya Angelou (@DrMayaAngelou) April 29, 2014

May Angelou was the speaker at my college graduation. She exhorted us to overcome, to rise, to confront life. And I know that all of us, my entire class of 500+ women, were lucky to have her there, kicking us out of the academy into real life. And all of us, people of this world of ours, were lucky to have her words, be they essays, poems, or tweets.

Thank you, Maya Angelou, thank you for your words.

Djungarians in our Midst

In the end, we succumbed. The girl didn't get a new brother, or a bunny, or another cat, but we are now a household of seven mammals: three people, two cats and two 2 Djungarian (Russian dwarf) hamsters. They are allegedly females, and so have been named Tilly and Tessie, short for Otillia and Anastasia.

Tilly is mostly white and bigger, weighing in at 1.16 ounces. Tessie is striped with grey, and weighs a mere 1.08 ounces¹. Tilly is in charge, and the cats are beyond fascinated.

In preparation for the hamster homecoming, the girl made me a $300 Amazon list of things they would need, like food, litter, toys and a big glass cage. I, being cheap - or is that frugal? - found a $25 cage via a local Facebook group. It's one of those fancy habitat things - two connected cages, with tubes and look-out spots and resting platforms - and it brings back dim memories of wishing for such a cool swanky cage when I was little and our gerbils lived in a boring glass aquarium. I'm pleased as punch to be able to give my girl something I'd never had, and at a bargain price to boot.

I tried to take pictures of the little beasts, but they move too fast, and the cage is backlit, being as it's on a window sill. So I ended up with but one unfortunate photo:

Because I like to share, I sent that picture to my siblings. Within seconds, my sister wrote back: "Accidental dong!" Um, yup. Indeed. Yes.

Anyway, we like our hamsters, and the girl loves them and yesterday texted me this:

Hi mommy a big box came
today for you. Can i open
it? I think my hamster
chew toy is in there

Usually I play grammar queen, and write back and correct her punctuation and capitalization, but this slayed me, so I left it alone.

She's sweet. I think I'll keep her.

(It was a box of toner cartridges, by the way.)

---

1. Why yes, we brought the kitchen scale up to her bedroom, for the weighing. Scientific method. We'd been guessing at their weights over dinner. Daddy had guessed that they were around 4 ounces each. Don't worry, I wiped the scale down well afterwards.

The Tiny Moments

Every morning, when my girl climbs into my bed for a snuggle, I think to myself that she'll one day be a teenager holding me at arm's length.

Quirky Tanning Services

Since both Julia and Maggie - the two people I tagged for that #mywritingprocess meme - called me quirky, I thought I'd give you quirky.

Here's what I've been scratching my head about:

You might need to click that to embiggen it, but yes, there is a question on the 990 about indoor tanning. The 990 is the Federal tax return that every organization exempt from income tax must file - that is, your non-profits, your foundations. At the bottom of page five, there is a yes or no question: Did the organization receive any payments for indoor tanning services during the tax year?

What I really want to know is how many exempt organizations receive payments for indoor tanning services, and are there enough of them that it warrants its own question on the tax return?

And why have I never noticed this question before?

* * * * * *

I looked it up. To quote from some accountant's blog:

The reason why such a question is included is because the 990 must be completed by organizations that are tax-exempt under sections of the Internal Revenue Code other than 501(c)(3) – public charities. Therefore, it is possible, for example, that a tax-exempt country club could be operating an indoor tanning service and since this organization also files a Form 990, this question would apply to them.

I suppose that's plausible. But then, why should a country club be tax-exempt‽

* * * * * *

It's hard being quirky.

Dust and Grail

A couple of years ago, we did a family read-aloud of "The Golden Compass". I'd read the book, we'd all seen the movie, but my husband hadn't ever read it, so every night after dinner, we'd sit down and one of us grown-ups would read a chapter aloud. If you've not read it, it's a little hard to summarize quickly. Suffice it to say that it interweaves magic, theology, science and armored bears, and that all of the humans have animal daemons, and that Dust is a mysterious important particle.

Towards the end of the book, Lyra finally makes her way to her father, Lord Asriel. [Note: this is a scene that's not in the movie.] In a long conversation about "dust", Asriel turns to the Bible to explain how sin came into the world, in Genesis. But the Golden Compass edition of the Bible - of course - includes daemons. Instead of reading thusly:

And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons. (Genesis 3:6-7)

Pullman's version reads:

And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to reveal the true form of one's daemon, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

And the eyes of them both were opened, and they saw the true form of their daemons, and spoke with them.

But when the man and the woman knew their own daemons, they knew that a great change had come upon them, for until that moment it had seemed that they were at one with all the creatures of the earth and the air and there was no difference between them:

And they saw the difference, and they knew good and evil, and they were ashamed, and they sewed fig leaves together to cover their nakedness..." (The Golden Compass, p. 372)

This passage, which we made sure to point out was an adaptation of the King James, what with those daemons, led to a lively discussion amongst us, as to the origins of the Bible and what one might like to believe about it, and why it's important to read it and that it's a significant piece of the literary canon. Several days later, the girl asked me to get the Bible down from the high shelf it lives on, next to a hymnal and a concordance and not far from the third edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians. I want to read about Jesus, she said. I made her start from Genesis; she slogged through several chapters and abandoned ship.

Until not too long ago, that is, when she - now ten - told me that she was reading the bible. Oh, said I, why? Well, I was watching Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and they were looking for the holy grail, and I thought I should learn more about Jesus. Okay, then.

* * * * * * * *

It is decidedly interesting to navigate the choppy waters of belief systems as a parent, especially given my longstanding status as a heathen pagan atheist¹. The child apparently has had many conversations about religion at school - not in school qua school, but on the playground, in the cafeteria, on the bus. One boy told her he could never marry her because she's not Jewish. Other children are incredulous that she's not anything. You have to be something, they say. She tells me that she tells them that there's no scientific evidence that god exists. And she's curious. She's read One World, Many Religions: The Ways We Worship². She knows, roughly, the difference between Catholics and Protestants because she's read about Bloody Mary. She's pretty good on the Greek myths, thanks to the D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths. We're going to go on a field trip to church - an Episcopal church, on Staten Island, where I know the Priest in charge³. We talk about lots of things at the dinner table - one recent meal included these wide-ranging vocabulary words: vernal, polygamy, geopolitical, solstice, autumnal, chalice. In short, we're working on religious literacy.

---

¹ The Belief-O-Matic says I'm a Secular Humanist.

² Incidentally, Mary Pope Osborne totally redeems herself in that book; I'd have never thought I'd want to own any books by the author of the infernal Magic Treehouse books, but this is a good one.

³ He married us, using a secular edit of the ceremony out of the Book of Common Prayer.

Tina

Driving around doing errands, all the windows open, we were blasting Tina Turner's Proud Mary, as one does.

10yo: I like this, who is it?

Me: Tina Turner. She's pretty great.

10yo: This is the woman from the Muppets movie?

Me: (furrowed brow, jaw agape)

10yo: No, wait, that's Tina Fey.

Me: Um, yeah. Tina Fey and Tina Turner are different people.

They are, aren't they?

Millicent. Miriam. Birds of a feather.

Millicent lived in my father’s bathtub, until he decided that the bathroom needed to be renovated. It’s awfully nice having a sturdy tile floor underfoot, instead of thinking that the toilet was going to plunge through the rotted old wood, but it was sad to see Millicent go. Someday, we’re going to stand her upright in the barn attic, facing the window, with a pinspot on her – Millicent on the half shell, if you will.

She came to mind because I found a delightful little ditty of a poem on Facebook not too long ago.

Careless Talk (by Mark Hollis)

Bill
Was ill.
In his delirium
He spoke about Miriam.
This was an error
As his wife was a terror,
Known
As Joan.

Being unsatisfied with knowing nothing about poem or poet, I dove down the search rabbit hole. I can’t find out anything about the poet, though there are three people named Mark Hollis on Wikipedia (an English musician, and American athletic director, and an Australian actor), but the poem seems to have been set to music twice, by Paul Sjolund, and by Richard Wilson.

In any case, I do think Miriam and Millicent are soul sisters.

Creepy

Because school break and my vacation don't always coincide, I took my 10yo to work one day last week. It was a lovely day, until someone stepped between us as we were getting off a crowded subway, and she got separated from me for an instant. She looked unsettled, and I asked her what was wrong. "Someone blew on my neck. That was creepy." And indeed it was - truly creepy. In that moment, it hit me hard that I won't always be able to protect her, and that my job as her mother is to help her learn to be as resilient as possible.

In Which I Start In One Place, And End In Another

You know how you meet people from time to time who are like siblings? I used to work with someone who could have been my brother. He and I got on famously, bickering all the time. I invited him to a party at my apartment, which both of my real siblings attended. They were both smitten; they too saw that he was clearly our brother-from-another-mother. He came for Christmas every year and he performed the ceremony at my sister's mock wedding (she'd eloped and this was the party for the masses, it needed a theatrical gesture).

More recently, not long after I started this blog, I found a sister-from-another-mother - Sarah, from Splitting Infinitives (though you might remember her as Slouching Mom). There are eerie coincidences in our lives, and we had similar mothers, and, it's hard to explain but we just share an odd cosmic bond. Last week, Sarah flattered me enormously and asked if I wanted to be next in line in a writing meme, #mywritingprocess, writing about how and why and what I write.

Here's the thing. I'm not a writer. Oh, I write. And I know that I'm a better writer now than when I started blogging. Even my husband says so. But I'm not a writer. I'm a woman. I'm a gardener and an occasional sewist, I'm a cook and a daily commuter. I'm a mother, I'm a wife. I'm a Horrible Mensa Bitch and the Director of Everything Else - those are my favorite alternative titles that I threaten to put on my next business cards, because my actual title is sort of dull and doesn't convey all of the things I do at work. But I do write. I write letters to the editor, and I write employee handbooks, and I write advertising copy, and I write recipes. And I write about the things my child does, and I write about my mother, and I write about words that annoy me, and I write about the delight one can find while merely walking down the streets of New York City. And I write tiny little book reviews, and I write emails to the PTA, and I write so many paragraphs and sentences and novels in my head that never even get anywhere near a piece of paper.

It's exhausting just thinking about it.

But I'm not a writer. I'll prove it to you: I am constitutionally incapable of answering the following assigned questions.

1) What are you working on?
Nothing.

2) How does your work differ from others' work in the same genre?
It's mine.

3) Why do you write what you do?
Because it's what occurs to me.

4) How does your writing process work?
It just comes. Like the gravy.

But what I do know is this: the more you write, the better it gets.

Two of my favorite writers - writerly writers - are next up.

The first is one of my oldest dearest friends, someone who writes and edits all day long, and blogs in her spare time: Julia of Lotsa Laundry. The other is an American in Paris Barcelona: Maggie of Maternal Dementia.

Let's put it this way. If I'm zooming through Feedly reading posts, I never ever hit "mark all read" on their posts. In fact, I usually "save for later" so that I can savor and ponder their words. You will too.