Night terrors.

An impromptu trip to see my family this week found me sleeping in my childhood bedroom, alone, for the past two nights. And when I say "sleeping", I mean "staring wide-eyed into the dark and trying desperately not to pee in my jammies".

This is not an unfamiliar sensation. Many things have changed in my parents' house since I was a child, but this -- the strategic placement of terrifying objects in spots where they ought not to be -- remains the same. I appreciate the sense of continuity, if not the constant goosebumps and sense of impending doom. Oh, yes, darling, you can go home again... IF YOU DARE.

I should be used to it by now. The house is old, and it creaks, and there are cold corners and long hallways and high-ceilinged rooms that swallow everything in darkness. It's all run-of-the-mill and not that frightening, until you factor in the other Various Scary Things that have become part of the landscape over the years -- the carved bust of a long-dead relative staring with sightless eyes from the corner of the living room, the odd Halloween mask dropped jauntily over the head of the newel post, paintings of flowers that have creepy faces in the center of the blossoms. (Yes, they do.)

This is my mother's doing. Mostly. Okay, I admit: some of it, like the empty-eyed bust, is genuine heirloom-whatever, and we have it, and so it has to be displayed no matter how scary it is. But there are other things, other things, for which there is no such excuse. Items that have been purchased, intentionally, and I can't even begin to imagine where; somewhere, there must be an untravelled store aisle marked "Things That Will Make People Scream and/or Pee". When I was seven, my mom brought home a life-sized Raggedy Ann Doll with oily glass eyes and a frozen smile. She put it in my room. She put it in a chair facing the bed, you guys, so that its black, empty stare would be the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes. Incredibly, she was never arrested for child abuse.

When people say, "Wow, I've never known someone who was almost thirty and still scared of the dark!", I tell them about Raggedy Ann. And then I shudder.

Anyway, twenty years later, Mom hasn't lost her touch. Raggedy Ann is long-gone, of course, but there's always something to serve the same purpose. Like, say, this.



The perfect addition to your boudoir decor, dear readers. By day, a dressmaker's dummy; by night, a shadowy, humanoid form, lurking in the corner behind the door, so that your guests can periodically wake up and discover that there's somebody in the roooooooooooom.

Mom, I know you're reading this, and I know I was all, "Oh, it's fine. Fine. I'm not bothered by it at all," but I lied, okay. Please get it out of there. For the love of God, you do not even MAKE DRESSES.

Pheromoan.

Back in my early twenties, before Brad had entered the picture and when all I really wanted to do was a) drink copious amounts of brown liquor and b) make out with everything in pants, a friend and I were discussing the challenges of the New York dating scene.

“You know,” she said, “it's not even that I can't make a relationship work – it's that I can't freaking meet anyone. In bars, on the street, in the subway... it's like no matter what I do nobody ever even tries to talk to me. You know what I mean?”

“Um,” I said.

Because while I definitely had my share of dating disasters – from bad first dates to terrible relationships to the time that I accidentally menstruated on an architect – the “meeting people” part was never really a problem. Neighborhood boys would chat me up while we waited in line for hangover bagels; friends of friends would ask for my number at parties; men in suits would drop business cards into my purse with a wink, mouthing, “Call me!”. I'd step on the train at 14th Street, and get off at Houston having traded digits with the guy sharing my subway pole. And once, in a moment which pretty much made my entire decade, a Hugh Jackman look-alike strode up to my table at a Thai restaurant, grinned, and actually dropped a note with his number on it next to my water glass.

And lest anyone think I'm using this as a precursor to claiming that I am, in fact, the hottest woman in New York (because really, at best, I might rank as “kinda cute”), my friend quickly put her finger on the truth of the matter.

“Well,” she said, “you're very... approachable.”

Which is a nicer way of saying that when I am out in public, I ooze a sort of friendly chemical-based Eau de Slut, which creeps up behind the backs of male strangers and taps them on the shoulder and shouts, in an oozy-chemical sort of way, “Hey, you see that girl over there? If you talk to her, she'll totally have sex with you!”

As a single person, oozing Eau de Slut had obvious and myriad benefits.
As a married person, it... doesn't.
And I can't stop oozing.

Not that this is happening all the time, okay, because it isn't, and I'm also not pretending that I don't sometimes like the attention, because... duh.

But too often, added to the fact that I rarely interact with other people anymore, and also the fact that my flirt-detecting skills are totally atrophied from disuse (“Wait a minute... is this guy talking to me, or is he TALKING to me?”), the result of any male approach is an increasingly awkward conversation that ends with me realizing too late that, oh fuck, we are TALKING, at which point I frantically attempt to defuse the entire situation by suddenly shouting, mid-conversation: “By the way! In case you are hitting on me, I am married!”

I also sometimes hold up my left hand, rings out, as supporting evidence, which is so obnoxious that I kind of can't believe nobody has torn my arm off in retaliation.

I need a better method, here.

I mean, apart turning to my friends at random intervals throughout the night and saying, “Hey, do I look like I want to have sex with you? No? Okay.”

Because I am already doing that.

Questions and answers

Since the last post, countless readers have absolutely made my day with congratulations and sweet compliments about the book -- which is really incredible, considering that none of you have read it. (Careful, you guys! It might really suck, and then we'll all feel like idiots!)

But I've also gotten a lot of questions about it. The three most popular:

- What's it about?
- Who's the intended audience?
- Will it be published? When?!

And the answers to these questions are as follows:

- It's complicated.
- I'm not sure.
- I don't know, and I don't know.

And so, not to be coy, but at the moment it's best that we all forget I ever said anything about this, at least for the foreseeable future. I'm not good at being patient, and I'm not good at letting things unfold on their own, and now I have to do both. AT THE SAME TIME. It's out of my hands.

And right now, there is nothing to report.

And if I allow myself to wonder about the potential outcomes of this thing -- this thing that has been burning a hole in my brain and pouring from my fingertips in fits and starts and huge, vomitous chunks for the past three years -- I will drive myself utterly fucking insane. People keep telling me that I should just be happy to have finished it; that the completion is an accomplishment, all by itself.

Not to me, it isn't. Nope. The choices are as follows: Publication, or self-made nutcase. And if this thing doesn't reach its logical conclusion in the form of a purchase-able object on Amazon dot com, you can rest assured that the latter will come to pass. They'll find me running through a nearby park wearing nothing but mismatched underwear and an aviator's hat, singing the lyrics to "Louie, Louie", and trying to lick the sternums of passing senior citizens.

And I don't even know "Louie, Louie".

So, let us pretend for now that I haven't written a damn thing.
Because if and when there is news, trust me, you will not be able to shut me up.

BUT.

There is this other question -- a question that crops up occasionally, and which never fails to amuse me -- that I can answer. So, here you go. To all the people who have asked if I was, am, or have ever been the writer behind The Company Bitch:

No.

Also, I love you.