MY BOYFRIEND CAN TOTALLY DANCE

Today, in honor of the holiday, I have two very scary stories to tell you.

First, I need to tell you about my phone. You know how when you type a text, your phone tries to second-guess what you are going to say? Maybe you are trying to write something like:

I am going to the store.

But your phone offers up the words:

I am goner to the stove.

You can understand mistakes like those. Phones are not inherently smart. For all your phone knows, you really do talk like a hillbilly en route through a kitchen. It just wants to make you happy, and it’s just guessing using the words stored in its little phone brain.

My phone, however, seems to have a kind of agenda. It doesn’t make simple, understandable word substitutions. It only has one word it wants me to use all the time.

That word is werewolves.

At least once very other message or so my phone jumps in and says, “Werewolves? Did you mean werewolves just then, when you typed the word very? Because I am so ready to type the word werewolves for you.”

“No,” I say to it. “I want you to type the word very. As in, you are a very dumb phone.”

“Werewolves?” it asks eagerly. “Please let me use the word werewolves.”

“Very,” I try again.

“Very werewolves?”

This is not a Halloween-only thing, this werewolf fixation. This is all the time. Predictive text is supposed to mirror the kinds of words the phone’s owner is likely to use a lot. I can assure you that I don’t use the word werewolves in my messages.

I don't know what my phone is trying to tell me.

Now, let’s get to the real, beating heart of the matter. I am going to tell you of a Halloween haunting that happened during my first semester of college.

The plain fact of the matter was that I had been locked up in the gulag (my Catholic girls school) for four years. For four years, I’d had to wear knee socks pulled up to my nose. The only guy in our building was our resident priest, Father Hickey (no, not a fake name) and our genuinely disturbing 21 year-old religion teacher, who I’ll call Mr. Weevil.

(A side note about Mr. Weevil: one day in class, he claimed he had a mathematical formula that proved the existence of God. I asked to see it, but he said it was too complicated. I said, “But Mr. Weevil, if you actually have a formula proving the existence of God, shouldn’t that be the only thing we study? Like, ever?” Mr. Weevil basically told me to shut up. I got my comeuppance when he was summarily fired for behaving in an excessively creepy manner.)

But you see my point. That was high school. And now, I was at college! I almost burst a blood vessel in my head when I looked around and saw that I was free! And that there were boys! LIVING WITH ME! Something had to give.

So I broke up with my boyfriend, who I had dated very seriously all summer. And I freely admit that I didn’t do it very well. I did it over the phone, which was cold. But I didn’t know any better then. Some would say I deserved what I got.

My boyfriend took it hard. He wanted us to stay together. To win me back, he launched a massive campaign called “let’s spend all of our free time at Maureen’s dorm.” He didn’t go to my school. This meant that he drove over from his school several times a day. The main tactic of this campaign was excessive, relentless niceness and cheer. He brought stuffed animals and left them by my door. When my roommate and I wanted to rearrange our furniture, he would miraculously show up with tools. I would sometimes find him herding up my friends and taking everyone for pizza, and, of course, I was invited. I had to keep my door closed for fear that he would turn up in my hall leading an impromptu conga line . . . again.

I considered this unfair. He had no right to keep showing up and leaping around on the green in front of my window like some kind of deranged gazelle. Those were my friends! It was my hall! My friends, for their part, liked the pizza and the conga lines, but were getting tired of answering questions about me.

Weeks went by like this. I became known as the “girl with the ex-boyfriend who won’t go away.” It was like I was haunted.

One Friday night, right around Halloween, I was walking through the lobby. I was on my way to a pre-Halloween party, an event I had been looking forward to for some time, as the guy throwing it had promised to make it a Maureen’s-ex-boyfriend-free zone, which meant that I could have fun and flirt with guys. This was very pleasing to me.

I was skipping across my lobby with joy when I noticed a friend of my ex’s, a high school guy. This particular friend (I’ll call him Pesky) seriously looked like he had never seen a girl before—never, ever, ever. At this moment, Pesky was slumped in a chair with glazed-over eyes.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, exasperated.

“Just sitting here,” he said in a sing-songy voice. “Watchin’ all the girls-go-by.”

This was creepy. And they usually signed in under my name, so I would be the one blamed for bringing the pervy guy into the building. I was going to fix this problem tonight. I was going to eject them all from the building. I was getting my life back.

“Where is he, Pesky?” I demanded.

Pesky didn’t even try to cover. He just pointed in the general direction and continued staring. I stalked off down the hall, glancing in the open doorways until I found him in my friend’s room. They had some loud music on. For some reason, my ex-boyfriend was lying on the floor, on his back.

“Hey Maureen!” he said. “Remember breakdancing?”

Before I could even reply, he flashed me a goofy “I am trying to win you back by being completely insane!” smile, then he started to spin on his back.

He spun and he spun and he spun. He spun right across the highly-polished linoleum dorm room floor like a top. It was, I have to admit, some first-class spinning.



He had a plan to pop-lock his way back into my heart.

The laws of physics tell us that an object in motion will remain in motion until stopped by an outside force. The outside force in this particular case was a desk, and the point of contact was my ex-boyfriend’s head.

CCRRRRAAAAAAAAACCCCCCCKKKKKKK.

It sounded like a redwood coming down in an empty church.

And he wasn’t moving. We all went over to him. He just lay there, completely still.

I was just getting over the fact that he was here being festive again, when it suddenly appeared that he had KILLED HIMSELF WHILE BREAKDANCING.

Okay, and yes, for one tiny, tiny second I thought to myself, “I’m free!” But then I was really worried again, instantly.

Finally, he let out a little groan and rolled on to his side. We helped him on to the bed.

“I think he really did something,” my friend said. “He doesn’t look good.”

“He’s fine!” I lied, as my ex-boyfriend coiled into a fetal position and clutched his own head.

After what seemed like an eternity, he managed to sit up and speak.

“I think . . . maybe . . . I should go and get something to eat or something,” he said.

“Good idea!” I replied. Anything to make him go.

He stumbled off across the street to a restaurant, taking Pesky with him. And hour or so later I got a call. He wasn’t doing so well. He was mumbling over dinner and kept forgetting what he was saying.

“I’ll be okay,” he slurred. “I’ll just drive home.”

This couldn’t happen, even though I knew what it meant.

“No way,” I said testily. “You are not driving anywhere. You just smacked your head open. You are going to the hospital.”

My bedside manner is usually much better than this, but I was feeling sorely tested. I was now going to the hospital with my ex instead of going to a party—and I was going because he had hurt himself while breakdancing in my building.

It turned out that he didn’t have his insurance card with him, so we would have to drive back to his house. Then we had to drop Pesky off, and pick up another friend who could take over the driving later. All of this took hours. This new friend sat in the car and tried to break the awkwardness by showing us how many golf balls he could get into his mouth, but nothing helped. We went to the hospital in stony silence, broken only by the soft noise of golf balls being spit out.

The emergency room was packed with people, many of them in costumes. The triage nurse was overwhelmed with damaged vampires and scraped-up superheroes.

“What should I tell her?” my ex-boyfriend asked.

“The truth,” I said. “You are going to tell the nurse how you did this. You are going to tell her that you crashed into a desk while you were breakdancing.”

I know. I was very mean. This isn't one of those stories that makes me look good.

So he did. The nurse just stared at him for a moment and wrote this down. This was not nearly as important as the car accidents and accidental shootings that were going on that night, so we sat there for hours and hours and hours next to a guy dressed as a bee who had some kind of really bad splinter. All the while, my ex fixed me with this moony look that could have been love or brain damage.

For my part, I tried to make sure that my expression gave a clear message of its own: “NO. THIS IS NOT HOW WE WILL BE SPENDING OUR NIGHTS FROM NOW ON. I’M ONLY HERE BECAUSE I’M AFRAID THAT IF YOU DIE, YOUR GHOST WILL FOLLOW ME AROUND. AND THERE HAD BETTER BE SOMETHING WRONG WITH YOU, BECAUSE IF THERE ISN’T, I WILL MAKE SOMETHING BE WRONG WITH YOU.”

The weird thing was that as the night went on, my annoyance with him slowly went away—even when we finally found out (at 3 in the morning or whenever it was) that he was completely fine, and the nurse just started laughing at him. This melted my cold heart. I must have really cared.

About a month later, I broke down and got back together with him.

And then he broke up with me.

And then we got back together. And I broke up with him. And then we got back together. This went on for a YEAR.

I don’t know what any of it means, except that it is scary, and that if your ex-boyfriend shows up in your dorm this Halloween and starts breakdancing, just run away. Be careful out there, you guys.

Also, werewolves. Very werewolves.

I'M A GIRL, MR. MICROPHONE

There are four things I have to say before I get on to today’s topic:

1. It’s still TEEN READ WEEK! So go to your library before it’s over! Which is TOMORROW! You can still vote for the Teens Top Ten here.

2. If you live in or around New Canaan, Connecticut, you get TWO chances to see me next week. On Tuesday, I’ll be at the New Canaan Library and Just Books. See the news page for more details.

3. If you do not live anywhere near there, you can meet me here on The Internet, as I am Wednesday's guest author blogger for the fabulous Harper Teen Fan Lit Writing Event. Have you seen this yet? If you haven’t, get there now. This is your chance to write part of a group story that’s being judged by cool authors and editors (including Meg Cabot), with a writer (like me) visiting every day. Also, prizes! Really, really good prizes.

4. Need more about me? There’s an interview with me at Bookburger. I’m excited about this because I love Bookburger. I get a burger named after me now (veggie, natch).

Hallowspooky is fast approaching, and it is at this time of year that I start collecting mini-pumpkins and thinking back on the worst Halloween costume, ever.

See, when I was a kid, my dad’s company had this big Halloween party for the employees’ children each year. They had little contests and giveaways and lots of candy, and for this reason, I loved it.

One year, I was maybe six or seven, I think my parents forgot when it was. I distinctly remember a muffled, “Oh #$%^#$%, is that today?” coming from downstairs. This was uncommon. My mother is the most scrupulously well-scheduled person in the universe. My guess is that my dad didn’t tell her, because my dad is not the most scrupulously well-scheduled person in the universe. I think my mom had that so covered that he just let his end of the bargain slide.

After this exclamation, my mom was suddenly on the phone. This was pre-cordless phone time, so there was no doing this in private. My mom was standing by our kitchen phone, making some ill-disguised phone calls about costumes.

Now, my best friend at home (I had a home best friend and a school best friend when I was six or seven) was named Jenny. Her parents were hippies, and mine were definitely, definitely not. Jenny’s parents let her stay up as late as she wanted, stuffed macrobiotic food down her throat (when they could—Jenny preferred Burger King), and had things like switch roles day, when she would be the parent and they would be the kids.

At Casa Johnson, these things did not happen. We ate meat, my parents were in charge, and I went to bed at something like four in the afternoon. (Okay, it wasn’t that early. But it was really, really early.)

Despite the fact that they were polar opposites, our parents got along really well. So it was Jenny’s mom that my mom was on the phone with. And Jenny’s mom was obviously providing my mom with a solution.

“Maureen,” my mom said. “I’ll be right back. I have to go get something.”

Jenny lived next door, so my mom was gone for about a nanosecond. She returned with a massive brown bag. It was lumpy too, like it contained potatoes or something.

“Okay,” she said. “Guess what! The Halloween party is today! And Peggy (that would be Jenny’s mom) gave you a costume to wear!”

Peggy could sew really well. She didn’t work, like my mom did, so she had a lot of time to construct incredibly complex Halloween costumes for Jenny. I tended to get the store-bought, boxed variety, and I was 100% fine with that. Frankly, I thought homemade costumes were weird, and I was addicted to that plasticy smell of the box costume. That smell meant CANDY. (To this day, that plasticy smell makes me think I am about to receive a chocolate bar. Brand new flip-flops have that smell, so I tend to find myself wandering into the candy aisle in a stupor when they appear in stores in early summer.)

So I was skeptical of this lumpy thing in the brown bag. It was about fifteen times bigger than my normal, beloved boxed costume, with its compact plastic outfit.

“Peggy made this,” she went on. “It’s really nice. You’re going to be the best dressed person at the whole party!”

“What is it?” I asked skeptically.

My mother folded over the top of the brown bag and tried to look confident.

“Well, it’s . . . an animal!”

“What kind of animal?”

“Well, it’s a . . . well, here. Just look!”

Which is when she pulled it out. The bag dropped away, and it was revealed, like some kind of grotesque striptease.

It was a skunk.

“It’s a skunk,” I said, showing off my incredibly sharp observational skill.

“Isn’t it great?” she said. She could barely hold the fake smile on her face.

Now, skunks are actually pretty cute animals. And the skunk is the basis for the most romantic character in all of cartoons—Pepe Le Pew, the French lover skunk that is always chasing that poor girl cat that accidentally had a stripe painted down her back. But all little kids know about skunks is that THEY ARE THE SMELLIEST ANIMALS IN THE ENTIRE WORLD.



That rare combination of romance and odor: the skunk.

“Skunks smell,” I said.

“This doesn’t smell.”

“But skunks do.”

“Look, Maureen,” she said, giving up the smile effort. “This is a great costume! Everyone is going to love it! And you have to get ready. So come on.”

I was dragged to the kitchen.

I was a pretty low-key kid. I think one of the reasons I liked the store-bought costumes is that they were kind of anonymous. They hid your face, for a start. And they were just like wearing clothes, except they were plastic and funny colored.

The skunk suit was well made. It was full-body, made of soft, plush black and white material. Coming off the back, it had a HUGE tail, which was supported by a wire frame, meaning it stuck up and out in a big curl.

I wanted to die. But there was nothing I could do—I was already being stuffed into the thing and having whiskers drawn on my face. Peggy had come over by this point, and was standing in our kitchen drinking coffee and saying, “Oh my God! She looks so CUTE!”

“I am a skunk,” I said internally.



The skunk is a fairly cute nocturnal animal with a keen sense of hearing. However, according to Wikipedia, it is most famous for its "anal scent gland." Also, there are no skunks in England. Did you know that?

I was dispatched with my father the moment he arrived home. I couldn’t sit down because my tail was too big, so I had to lie on my side in the back of the car, like I was being smuggled. I was an illegal skunk.

The party was at a big hall the company owned and probably used for meetings. There was a massive room with a linoleum floor and tables set up all around. There was a guy with a microphone who was the master of ceremonies When I walked into the room, he said.

“Well! Would you look at that! Looks like we have a SKUNK!”

Everyone turned.

“I want to go home,” I said.

“What?” my dad said. “We just got here. You love this party.”

“I’m a skunk,” I explained.

“Come on, Maureen. Give it a try.”

I was ushered in the direction of other kids with costumes, and my father went off to talk to some work buddies. I didn’t know any of these kids. We only came together for this party once a year, so it was an impersonal experience.

“P-U!” some boy said. “A skunk!”

It wasn’t mean. That is what you are supposed to say when you see a skunk. P-U is the accepted response.

“I don’t smell,” I explained.

“I know,” he said. “But you’re a skunk.”

“Yeah,” I said sadly. “I guess so.”

Mr. Microphone announced that it was time for contests (we had gotten there pretty late), and we were put into lines for spoon races.

“Make way for Mr. Skunk!” he said, putting me at the front of the line.

“I’m a girl,” I said.

I could understand the mistake. I was under a lot of costume. But still.

“Oh!” he said. “Sorry!”

He was sorry, but he made this mistake for the rest of the entire afternoon. I was Mr. Skunk. So not only was I the world’s most smelly animal, I was now a boy. I wasn’t sure what part was worse.

The strange part was, I was sort of treated like a celebrity. The other kids really seemed to like me, even if they thought I was a boy. My costume was SO massive, and SO plush. I definitely stood out. All the parents cooed over me and how cute I was. I probably did look cute, but in my mind, the word “cute” was a kind of insult. I didn’t want to be cute. I wanted to be Batgirl, like I was last year, in my plastic mask. I wasn’t cute then. I was just a normal kid in a plastic outfit.

After what seemed like 200 years, the trauma was over. And in the end, I scored an unbelievable amount of candy. I won the costume contest. I won the spoon race. And I think people just gave me extra. That night, my mom took me out to pick out my box costume for Halloween proper, and I began the process of recovery.

I’m fine now. Really. But I am A GIRL, Mr. Microphone, wherever you are.

BAD JOB

First of all, I have to yell it loudly: IT’S TEEN READ WEEK!

This is important for several reasons. The first is that your library is probably doing some good events! The second is that you can vote for your favorite YA novels of 2006. And, why, look at that! (*cough, cough*) 13 Little Blue Envelopes is on there! There are lots of good books on the list, and voting is quick and easy.



I’ve gotten some interesting e-mails recently asking me what it’s like to work in publishing. Specifically, the questions were about being an editor, and whether or not that’s a good job. There are many kinds of editors—but I’m going to talk about fiction editors. Book editors. The kind I work with.

First thing to note is this: editors in big publishing houses work really, really hard for basically no money for a long time. And unless your family actually owns the publishing company, you’re probably not going to start editing books on your first day. Your first job will probably be as the slave of a higher-up editor. You will handle their busy schedules, find missing shipments of books, deal with calls from insane writers. Your desk will groan under the weight of all the submissions that agents have sent to your Editor, submissions you will have to sort and catalog and read.

You are Edit Monkey, and you belong to the publishing house. That includes your evenings and weekends, which you will spend reading manuscripts. You will get lots of free books that you really, really want, but you will never have time to read them because you will be busy reading all the crap your Editor doesn’t want to read.

And you’ll like it, Edit Monkey. Free time is overrated.

No, you can’t afford your apartment or food or anything, but you will sometimes be asked (told) to go to a cocktail party for some writer, where you will steal all the canapés you can get your mitts on.

“I love you mini soufflé,” you will say to your food. “And you too, little piece of bread with stinky cheese on it. I have been so very hungry.”


Perhaps you will encouter a cheese ball shaped like a lobster, like this one. See how it grips crackers in its cheesy claws.

However, if you like books, this is something you may be prepared to deal with. And if you have a good Editor, you’ll start editing pages of actual novels. You’ll be asked your opinion when it comes time to select books. You will be invited to lunch, instead of hunkering at your desk with a sandwich and a stack of paper. You will meet writers (which is a point of debatable value). You will climb from position to position—through all kinds of levels of “assistant” and “associate.” And if you make it through and you’re good, then you will become an editor.

Editors do all kinds of things. They acquire books—meaning, they decide to publish that book that you’ve worked so hard on. They guide your through the process of revising it. They deal with your agent to get you a contract. They work inside of the company to make sure your book is advertised. They do a hundred different things that the writer never sees, but makes all the difference in the world.

If you’re really excellent, you will be like my editor, Emma Lollipop. Emma has an air of Jedi calmness about her. She knows exactly what to say to help you along with your book. She can stare down a room full of salespeople and never blink. And she supports her writers. For example, Emma came to see me speak at the Brooklyn Book Fair. She rode over the Brooklyn Bridge on her pearl-pink bicycle, opened the basket, and pulled out a box of beautiful pastel-frosted cupcakes. (A little nod to Devilish.) Now, that’s style.

But now I will tell you about my first experience working as an editor, which has no bearing at all on any of the above. It was a bad job. I freely admit this.

I worked at a small company where I was quickly promoted, in much the same way that sailors on a sinking, scurvy-infested ship can quickly rise through the ranks. The company I worked for was owned by two people who just thought it would be a good idea to start a publishing company. I don’t think a lot more thought than that was put into it. They rented a big loft in New York, stuffed it full of IKEA furniture, and let it all just kind of happen. And happen it did.

The place was run with a kind of breathtaking incompetence. For example, one of the owners hired her own daughter to be a bigwig there. On her very first day, she sat down everyone and said, “I don’t really know how to make books.” This is sort of like someone wandering into NASA on his or her first day of work and saying, “Do I get one of those uniforms like they have on Star Trek? Oooh! What does this button do?”

My boss acted like someone who had recently been broken out of a cult compound and deprogrammed. She had glazed-over eyes, a deep paranoia, and not even a hint of a clue what she was doing. She wrote poetry about hats that she forced everyone to read. She sometimes erased the server by accident. She could not budget or edit or manage. This never stopped her from trying, so most of what we did all day was repair the damage.

It may shock you to hear this, but the company went broke in record time. We received no Christmas bonuses or gifts, but my boss forced us to contribute to ones for the owners. They were two inexpensive cable-knit sweaters, which we were asked to decorate by cutting out paper “ornaments” shaped like the owners’ favorite things. I cut out small paper airplanes to reflect our one boss’s passion for his private aircraft. There was a party, but we had to bring the food.

It was not a fun day. We all stood around a table full of the meager offerings we could afford, celebrating the fact that the owner of our company was rich enough to buy himself a plane. My deranged boss read her poetry aloud—a soul-crushing experience that left us all zombified. Then she forced us to sing carols. And I do mean forced. She swung her arm and sang out in a shrill voice, as we shuddered by the Doritos and the bean dip. Then we were told to get back to work.

The physical office took on the qualities of the business that inhabited it. Everything was broken. My lamp occasionally burst into flames due to faulty writing, but was never replaced, merely extinguished. The IKEA kitchen wall unit once disengaged itself from the wall and fell on to my friend, who had to stand there and support twelve feet of Swedish home interior until someone ran over to help.

The office had mice that sat on the copier and mocked me when I worked late into the night, forcing me to keep banging my feet floor into the floor in a mad keep-away dance. The owners of the company finally addressed this problem by getting two cats and forcing them to live in an office. The chairs, the keyboards . . . everything was covered in the hair of these poor, enslaved cats.

I left, deciding that nothing was really worth this. When I made one of my last visits to pick up my final check on a cold December day, I found my friends working in coats, hats, scarves, and fingerless gloves. The rent had not been paid, and the heat had been turned off. Not long after that, the checks stopped coming, and people started working on credit. And when the doors finally closed on this doomed enterprise, the money stopped coming entirely. All that was left was some cat hair, some bad chest colds, and our memories.


When we got cold, we sometimes resorted to burning scraps of our dignity.

But, to answer your question, person who e-mailed . . . being an editor is great!

No, really!





I'm serious!

EDIT HEAD

E. Lockhart gave me a copy of The Boy Book the other week. Lucky me, right? So here I am, wandering around my apartment reading about what actually happened to Ruby Oliver and Jackson (Jackson is one of the best depictions of a skeevy guy I’ve ever read). In my other hand, I had a mug.

But I was also generally distracted, because my brain was full of Girl At Sea edits. So when I got to the kitchen, I put The Boy Book in the sink. Not only into the sink—but into a sink FULL OF WATER.

I did not mean to put The Boy Book into a sink full of water. I meant to set it on the bookcase. But that’s where I left the mug. It was next to the drill.

What drill? Oh, that would be the drill I ended up buying when I went out looking for jeans. I really needed those jeans, too. “Maureen,” I said to myself. “Do not come home without them.”

But like I said. Drill. Not even a big, impressive drill. A mini-drill. For my mini-drilling needs. And I do need the drill, because I managed to knock down a shelf.

“What is wrong with you?” you must surely be asking.

It’s a good question. I have Author Edit Head. This is a common ailment among writers.

Many of us would freely admit that even on the best of days, we’re not brain surgeons. But when we get deeply into the very, very last days of our books, we get very, very focused on writing and fixing, and very, very bad at everything else. Our entire world is colored by whatever we are working on. We’re overrun with details. The red scarf on page 81 that accidentally became a blue scarf on page 167. The number of times we repeated a certain word in a single paragraph. That clanking paragraph. The chapter that still makes no sense. An overuse of commas.

So we may not immediately notice that we’re on the wrong train, or that sandwich we have been eating is actually just a piece of bread with mustard on it, or that our sleeve is smoldering, but not yet on fire.

Now, it’s possible that this is just me, and that I’m always like this and Author Edit Head is something I just made up to cover for my general soft-headedness, but I do not think so.

Charles Dickens is said to have walked twenty-five miles a day or something like that. My suspicion? He was always working on a massive book and was in a constant state of Author Edit Head and forgot to stop.

Agatha Christie once left her car abandoned in a pit and disappeared for a week. It was said to have been a mysterious disappearance, or a stunt. Again, I suspect Author Edit Head.


A rare, actual photograph of Leo Tolstoy, during the final days of working out the glitches of War and Peace.

So, while I sit here with the pages of Girl At Sea, Oscar Gingersnort has kept me from hurting myself on the furniture. I just sharpen my pencils and work.

Notice, also, that Oscar has enabled all of these wonderful things on the blog! Comments! Post e-mailing! He does not have Author Edit Head. Please take advantage of these new joys. Are you a writer? Do you suffer from AEH? Tell us all about it.

ISSUES OF LANGUAGE

There was some swearing today in the MJ Philly office.

Okay. There was quite a bit of swearing. There was so much swearing that I am a bit shocked that I did not cause the wallpaper to fall off the wall in big strips. But I had a good reason.

I was attempting to set up a wireless network in my parents’ house.

Now, I'm no computer tech person or engineer, but when it comes to very basic computer things, I’m okay. And the guy in the store assured me that it was all very easy: switch out a cable, plug a new one in, put in a CD. Nothing too complicated. No translating any instructions from the original Cantonese, nothing that involved stripping wires, no algebraic equations. The instructions were on a single sheet, not a booklet—always a good sign.

And yet, and yet . . .

It didn’t work. The instruction CD died in the drive, the attempt to download the instructions failed, and after spending 45 minutes on the phone with tech support, during which I hooked the wireless router up a total of eleven separate times, THE PHONE FAILED. The guy started saying, “Are you there? I can’t hear you anymore. Hello?”

“I can hear you!” I yelled. “DON’T GIVE UP ON ME!”

We continued saying these things to each other for a full five minutes.

A trick I have in these situations is to start saying really crazy things, because that’s when the connection always comes back. I started singing some of the greatest hits of the 1980s, including The Go-Go’s “Our Lips Are Sealed” and “Our House” by Madness. I started telling him a really embarrassing story about how once, when I was four, I was so excited to go and play with my friend that I forgot to put my pants on before leaving the house (it’s only happened once since). I told him I was Angelina Jolie. I told him I killed a man once and would reveal the location of the body only to him.

“I cannot hear you,” he replied to all of the above. “Can you hear me?”

I showered him with the many explicatives that were coming out of my mouth earlier. I told him that he tried and did all he could, but some situations are doomed from the start. I told him I loved him.

“Hello?” he said.

And then I hung up.

"I love you, #$%^%^#%$#," I said.

So there is no wireless network, the modem is pulled out, there are wires all over the floor, and I had to drink a cup of calming tea. In two hours time, I will be over at the Barnes and Noble in Oxford Valley, PA, and I will try not to use any of the language and that has been coming out of my mouth for the greater part of this afternoon.

Many thanks, by the way, to the very nice people at the Barnes and Noble in downtown Philadelphia, especially Lee. They did not even bat an eye when I attempted to break into their securely locked closet, or mistakenly told someone that they had won a $500 gift certificate, when they had in fact won a book.

Please come out tonight if you are in the area. There is no telling what I may do. I may give you a car, or I may tell you to @^(*$(%*@ $&%($&%(&$ #^&^&*$^%&*.

It’s a hard call. But you know I love you.

GET TO KNOW ME

Girl At Sea is literally going to be done tomorrow. Tomorrow! So, if you’ve written to me recently (or maybe even not recently) and I haven’t written back—I’m sorry, and I plan on answering a whole lot of e-mail over the next few days.

But why settle for e-mail?

This week happens to be rich in opportunities to get closer to yours truly. And what a week it is to know me. For the last three days, I have done nothing but sneeze. (And finish a book, but there was sneezing throughout.) Out of nowhere, I seem to have developed a massive allergy to everything.

And . . . my hair has gone curly. I have never had curly hair, so where this came from, I have no idea. It’s not as curly as many of you undoubtedly are, because some of you lucky people were born with big, bouncing ringlets. Not me. I was born with hair that is straight. Straight like a rail. So my definition of curly means that it is wrapping in long, loose, curl-ish things. It is like a Halloween miracle.

APPEARANCES IN THE CITY OF BROTHERLY LOVE

Attention Philadelphia! I am returning to the town of my birth. I’ll be doing TWO appearances in the area this week for the HIGH SCHOOL IS HELL tour.

Both of these are technically for teachers, but anyone can go. There will be Q&As and signings at both. There is also a better than average chance that I will still be sneezing.

Wednesday, October 4th, 7:15 PM
Barnes & Noble
1805 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA

Thursday, October 5th, 8:00 PM
Barnes and Noble
450 Oxford Valley Road, Langhorne, PA


APPERANCES IN YOUR EARS

This week, you can hear me chattering away to myself on the Penguin podcast. And to make the deal even sweeter, I share this particular podcast with John Green, author of Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines.

This is both cool, and deeply unfair to me, as John Green is regularly on the radio and used to chattering away to himself. Whereas I am not. He is deeply, deeply entertaining. I’m more like that crazy kid in the movie Wet, Hot American Summer (please tell me you’ve seen it) who calls himself The Beekeeper and “broadcasts” the official summer camp radio show into a microphone that isn’t even plugged in.

The podcast is now up! Listen to it here, if you dare.

Now, I’m (ACH-CHOO!) back to work.