It’s been quite a month here in Eleanor-land. It all started when I dropped my Blackberry in the toilet. Or rather, it committed suicide. Either way, the poor thing was ding dong dead. Which meant I had to buy a new one. And that I lost all of my links and phone numbers, because no, I never backed it up with my laptop. Am I the only person who doesn’t even know her own mother’s phone number without it typed in the cell phone address book?

And without the Blackberry, there was no more Twitter, because I can’t access it from my work computer and I’ve been trying to stay offline when I’m home. Oh, and since my DVD player stopped spinning, I’ve been using my laptop as a movie viewer at night. Which means it’s all the way upstairs in the bedroom, so it might as well be in Timbuktu when I’m couching.

Oh and then there’s the work travel. Charleston one week, Atlanta the next. (By the way, I met Shaft at a hotel bar…). I’m off to DC twice, New Orleans, and Atlanta again before the year is over. My suitcase looks like it’s been in a losing battle. And it now lives in my front room, the better to whisk out the door with it.

And oh yeah, I’ve been writing. Not much here, obviously, but I’m trying to squeeze in an hour a day scribbling something down. And I got the loveliest rejection letter from The Atlantic Monthly.

And I got in a fight with my dad over Fox News, but I think we’re ok now.

And BC and I went out on Wednesday for “a quick drink” and ended up loudly drowning the night over bourbon and beer and playing along with Jeopardy (my strong suit) and Wheel of Fortune (his). I woke up this morning hating myself and he woke up with a half-eaten donut of unknown origin on his kitchen table. I think he wins.

Which all goes to say- SHE LIVES! (Thanks to all of you who’ve checked in to be sure…).

I am officially obsessed with Texts From Last Night. I can’t help myself. My entire lunch break, I have been calling people and reading various entries aloud. Yes, I know I’m a big dork. Also, some of you texters… well, I wanna hang out with you. Also, it’s Friday and this lady would like to follow her yoga class after work with an adventure. I hope BC bought the bourbon.

Congrats to the following winners in the free “Born to Fit”  Gap jeans drawing, courtesy of the scientific hat: Wide Lawns  and “Jen” (commenter #34). Keep an eye out in your email for one from me so I can get your address and mail your certificate. Hooray for Thursday winners!

But I am livid and more than a little peeved about the awful decorum  from one South Carolina congressman last night during the healthcare speech. Joe Wilson, you should be ashamed of yourself.

This is the face of the Republican “debate” on healthcare. My Granny would not invite you to her house for dinner, sir, and she is a Republican. You have bad manners. And you apologize poorly.  

If you feel as ticked off as me and can’t access the Congressman’s website due to traffic, you can contact him the old-fashioned way at:

Congressman Joe Wilson

212 Cannon House Office Building

Washington, DC 20515

(202)-225-2452 phone

Thank you.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming…

Summer was a short one here in Pittsburgh this year- it never really warmed up until mid-July, I was gone for most of August, and now we’re dipping into the 50’s at night and back in flannel pj’s. In the ten years we’ve been friends, BC and I have made a ritual of squeezing the last out of the beautiful weather while it lasts, before we’re stuck in gray slush for six months. Yesterday was no exception.

As soon as I dipped out of the office, I headed to Squirrel Hill to rendezvous with a pile of books and notebooks in my groaning bag. Then we dodged the traffic and headed to Schenley Park, where we sprawled on a blanket in the grass until the sun had finally slipped below the horizon. As usual for these adventures, I read exactly nothing. Instead we plotted out highly profitable novel and book ideas, made jokes about anorexic babies (yes, we’ll burn in hell), and ate an entire bowl of fresh blueberries. Then it was over to Cold Stone Creamery for chocolate cake batter ice cream with strawberries as dinner.

Our plan for this long weekend is to cram as many summer activities in as possible- we’ll hit up the amusement park, drink cocktails on BC’s porch, etc. Any suggestions for must-do summer fling weekend agenda items? The idea is to fit a whole summer into three days. What would you do if you had to fit your summer into a long weekend?

OK. I am getting back on the horse after too much time away and much too little time writing while I was studying how to write. And to make it all up to you, it’s time for a contest.

Two readers, randomly drawn from a very scientific hat, will receive a certificate for a free pair of Gap jeans (mens or womens) at any Gap store in the US. Comments will close down this Saturday, so get your comments in now. (Oh, and be sure you list a valid email address when you are submitting your comment so I can contact you for your mailing address!).

The new Born to Fit Gap jeans are pretty darn groovy, if I do say so myself. I’ve been rockin’ a pair of boot cuts all weekend… to break them in… and out of laundry laziness.

After twelve days without cell phone access or a laptop, I’m feeling very absorbed into the non-online world. I crawled out of bed every morning to read or write or hear amazing writers read their work or drink from vats of free coffee. And now, it’s back to the office again to drudgery and email and conference calls. Well, and a new box of office supplies…. there’s always a silver lining.

I would have to say the highlight of the trip, aside from some reassurance that I can write a little and talk about writing a lot, had to be a brief non-illicit wooing by a lovely poet. We traded poems, we sat by firesides, we ate meals, we danced. And with nothing seedy to leave residuals, we, I hope, became friends. A little romance in the woods never hurt anyone. Least of all me.

I’ll be back in the saddle by the end of the week with tales to tell, but for now, you can find me shoveling at email with two blackberries and a desktop computer until they stop threatening to bury me alive.

I missed you all and hope the last two weeks have been kind to you. What are your latest adventures?

My little sister, the hippie, is not so little anymore. She will soon be celebrating her second wedding anniversary, is a homeowner, and every morning wakes up to teach other people’s children. She is the teacher with a roomful of amphibians and who buys her own children’s books to supplement the class’s budget. At her wedding, she was the bride whose students danced with her on the dance floor and she was often toting one or another of them on a hip against her fluffy white gown. She is pretty amazing, and all the more so because she was my younger sister all her life and the kid who skipped school and partied and has somehow gracefully become a wife to her high school sweetheart and puts her tiny dog in sweaters.

A month or so ago, she showed up for family dinner at the parents’ house in Atlanta with some news. She and her husband, let’s call him Coors Light, were going to make my very excited mother a grandmother. Despite the Hippie’s worries about “quality,”  they had done the deed and verified it with three home tests- Baby Light was definitely on the way.

Rather than wait the compulsory three months, they shared the news with the whole family and made sure to dial me in from Pittsburgh. My other sister, the Yuppie, and I were in a stiff battle to be the best aunt this kid could ever dream of, including an escalating price war for the right baby gifts and visions of bulk airfare purchases in my future.

Then, one day in the middle of the workweek, the Hippie called my cell phone. She never calls in the middle of day, so I called her back immediately. And there she was on the other end of the line, my little sister, in tears. At her second doctor’s appointment, they informed her that unfortunately, the baby didn’t have a heartbeat. She would miscarry. And Baby Light would not be along in time in for Valentine’s Day for she and her high school sweetheart.

I insisted she call me any time she needed anything. I called the Yuppie to insist she keep me informed if there was anything I could do. I was humbled to find that Coors Light had called off work for two days to be with my sister so they could mourn together. And I was at a complete loss… what can a sister do from several states away when her little sister’s heart is breaking?

After a thorough family survey to double-check and with a month or so behind her, the Hippie is apparently doing ok, all things considered. She and her husband are still in their twenties and have time to try again and there’s no sign that she has any reason to worry they won’t be able to have a healthy child. Just not this child.

But, nonetheless, Baby Light was a dream they shared. And we all shared it along with them for a few brief months. And there is no manual for how to grieve when you’re a big sister grieving from far away. I think it’s time to make a visit home soon. I miss my baby sister. Even if she is all grown up now.

I admit it. I’ve been a bit stumped lately for blog post ideas. My day-to-day life soldiers on, without much that seems novel to me. Off to work, groan about work, realize I shouldn’t complain because I have a job in this economy, pay bills, meet BC for a drink, yada yada yada.

I’m used to summers being full of adventures- eating outside cafes, concerts, trips to state fairs, playing in the river at Ohiopyle, backyard barbecues. But this summer in Pittsburgh has been rainy and cool and not particularly inspiring when it comes to outdoor activities. Which of course leads me to feeling blah and dreading that fall will be here before we know it, and I love fall, but we didn’t have a summer, and then it will be winter, and ohmygod the snow. Yep. I’m there.

In order to remedy this situation, and escape for a while, and because BC would have killed me if I turned it down, I’ll be on a bit of a sabbatical from August 12 – 23, in a land without cell phone service… Middlebury, VT. I applied to, and was wait-listed at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and then got a phone call asking if I still wanted to attend. Um… attend a writing conference that practically every great writer ever has attended and spend a week and a half going to workshops and readings and strolling about on a beautiful campus instead of being at work? Yes, please.

I’ll be truly unplugged unless I shuttle into town as far as the cell phone goes, and am going to try to avoid the internet as well (though there’s a computer lab, so we’ll see how long it takes me to give in on that front). So, while I may not have a summer going here, I have a “back to school”. And I’m hoping, an adventure or two to bring home to all of you.

After months where I thought I’d gotten ahold of myself, I managed to be in the same bar with the ex and having a decent conversation. We talked about work, writing, slam poetry, and then moved on to the Gap sponsorship deal. And that’s where the conversation unravelled. He asked for stats to justify the move, and then, as if in a web 2.0 bolt of lightening, realized that all these years, someone’s been reading what I wrote. And promptly got pissy.

I explained that I write anonymously, that almost no one who reads me knows who I am, that I don’t write with names, that I write for me and that all of you are just gravy on the boat of putting how I feel written the way I feel it out in the universe. And all of a sudden, it occurred to him that someone reads this. That my good and bad behavior and his is out there on the internet for people to read. And I was the bad guy all of a sudden.

And here, after all these months, I am, feeling like crap, like everything that has happened is my fault somehow, because of a website he thought was a joke for years. Being the upstanding citizen that I am, and a queen of passive aggression, I promptly threw every other girl along the way in his face.

And now, I’m here. At home alone in the dark, with only the screen in front of me. And I have to make this stand. My words are my words. I put them out there, largely to readers I’ve never met. But, I am honest. I put the ugly and the real out there, even when I don’t come out smelling like roses. And to him, this is probably just one more reason that every girl in the world looks more attractive to him than me. But I claim this ground. This is my one square inch of space in the world, and if I look bad in the telling of it, or he does, it is what it is.    

And I refuse to apologize. It is my life. And I can only tell it from my perspective. But in the darkest moments, this is sometimes all I have- my own spare space to put it out there- ugly and all. I am me. And I’ll be damned if the anxiety of someone who showed so little interest until now will keep me silent. I am me. I write. I vent. And I have been wronged. Hear me roar.