"I'm offering you my body and you're offering me semantics." - Caitlin Bree, in "Clerks"

More than one of you has asked if I am pregnant.

(Dudes, is it really that crazy to clean out my refrigerator? A woman at work told me yesterday that she does her ONCE A WEEK. Now THAT'S crazy.)

The answer is, no. As far as I know.

I mean, yes, I ate three doughnuts for breakfast this morning.

And spent all day yesterday trying not to cry (they gave me a new computer at work – yay! They did not reload my personal profile with all my documents, email archives, necessary software, or bookmarks – boo! You would cry too if it happened to you!)

But, I have been back on the pill for a few months now, and my Friend just arrived (2 weeks early – WTF is up with THAT?) and I have a raging headache which is generally a precursor to the migraines I get every month at That Time.

So, signs point to No.

But if I am, Gina has my permission to kill me now.
Oh, I suppose I don’t really mean that.
But maybe I do.

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I am finishing up Elizabeth Gilbert’s wonderful Eat Love Pray. I was a little worried that this memoir of a thirty-something woman going off on a world trip to find herself after a devastating divorce was going to be trite, or overwrought, or hopelessly annoying in that smarmy, self-help-book sort of way.

But it isn’t. It so isn’t.

She is honest and intelligent and self-deprecating and humorous, and while sometimes she does veer into territory I am uncomfortable with (especially when she begins to experience God through meditation), she is so forthright about her happiness but also her doubts that she is, quite simply, endearing. She also is fortunate enough to have good friends who manage to help her keep her feet solidly grounded in reality. Gilbert is the type of person that Gina and I would term a “porch friend,” meaning that we can see ourselves enjoying hanging out with her on Gina’s homey front porch, drinking Diet Coke and shooting the shit for hours on end.

This is the sort of book that you copy parts of into your journal, or if you own your own copy (and I intend to buy this), underlining passages that made you stop reading and say, “Hey! Yeah!” so you can find them again when you need them.

I recall vaguely having read some of Gilbert’s fiction (Stern Men?) and being underwhelmed, but I may need to give her novels another shot. And her book The Last American Man about a modern-day Grizzly Adams-type looks downright fascinating.

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I picked up Alex Kuczyinski’s Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession With Cosmetic Surgery and Gillian Flynn’s thriller Sharp Objects from the library yesterday on my lunch hour, so today – another cold, snowy, windy day – will be spent, between throwing in loads of laundry and baking a meatloaf for dinner – curled up on the armchair, reading Sharp Objects, while perhaps I let my not-really-sick-but-mildly-not-well children veg in front of “Cars.”

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