Catching & Hanging Up

Prepare for lots of subject jumping. The money was fluttering everywhere but in my pocket this weekend as I continued to try and shop away my bad mood. I buy books like other people buy art. Just to have them. So I bought a copy of "America's Boy", the author Wade Rouse, I am to interview on Wednesday. Whether I finish his book in time or not - is anybody's guess. But it seemed appropriate to buy the book of the author you're interviewing. Then I bought a copy of "Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", because I've always wanted one and I figure that after I finish Anderson Cooper's "Dispatches from the Edge", I'll need something to tell me how to see more into my own life. I could never drink wine from a box, I once told Kim, as we perused the aisles of Target. But wine from a cube - well that's cuter. So I tried one. A wine cube. Red Sangria - very tasty. I made penne with tomato basil and a small salad. Making food like that makes me feel like I don't live in my little town in Michigan. I slept for twelve hours, exhausted, irritated, I woke up and threw myself into the shower. I barely moved all day. I am mentally, emotionally and physically exhausted. I can't write, I can barely think about my stories. I want just a bit of time with no work. Nothing to think of that I have to do next. Nothing coming up I have to worry about. An empty mind all together. Just a bit of time for my body and mind to catch up to my life. With all the new movies I bought, I watched "Pride & Prejudice" for the third time and then threw in "Hanging Up" with Meg Ryan - pre "In The Cut" pre "Against the Ropes" pre divorce with the lovely Dennis Quaid. One of the guys I work with loves Meg Ryan. He is in his early fifties - if that, soft-spoken with a lovely wife. But on his desk by his computer is a picture of Meg Ryan in cropped panties sitting seductively, her fingers pointing upward by her head - a devilish girl next door. I love that movie because Nora Ephron is the Upper West Side's Jane Austen. Because in it Meg Ryan is delightful. Because Diane Keaton is delightfully selfish. Because I wish I had two sisters. And if I did, they would wear black Donna Karan and make a stuffing for Thanksgiving with apples and apricots and live in big houses that don't look like they belong in L.A. And I could break out a scene from "Philadelphia Story" and they would know just what I was talking about... the way Katharine Hepburn plays a hangover with the statement, "I'm going crazy, I'm standing here solidly on my own two hands and going crazy." My sisters and I would bicker over our cantankerous father who says John Wayne has a little pecker and we would remind ourselves how important sisters are during intimate flashbacks of our childhood. And then we'd break out the Sangria, the pasta, the classic standards sung by Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald. We'd discuss moods, men and maybe even a book or two. A good movie. How delightful Keira Knightly is and how we'd take Jake Gylenhaal over Heath Ledger any freakin' day. We'd flip through InStyle and Women's Health magazine and I'd tell them how I'm planning on buying exercise equipment. And slowly my mood would melt away. I climb into my bed with dishes waiting to be washed in the sink, a list of things to do forming in my head…my body and mind catching up to my life.