Laura's Brant

So You're Jewish But You Have A Christmas Tree

2010-12-03T13:10:00.000-05:00

Laura's Brant has moved! Again!

2009-09-12T12:36:00.004-04:00

Laura's brant has just moved -- again! -- to a new location! Please forgive her on-going Escape Fantasy Disorder and constant brant-address-switching but it was time to have a site with a clean white background, big type, and a different format.

Come visit and continue to follow Laura's bragging and ranting at http://laurazigman.wordpress.com/

-- thank you!

See you there!

GPS Upgrade

2009-08-31T00:01:00.005-04:00

Given last week's brant about Laura and her GPS, she couldn't resist posting this link about the possibility of Bob Dylan becoming a GPS voice.

Laura would definitely get lost on purpose as much as possible (as opposed to getting lost not on purpose the way she usually does every minute of every day).

(photo credit: AP Photo)

(Mis)Reading the Map

2009-08-25T10:27:00.011-04:00

Laura and the family just returned from a 9-day modified staycation -- she'll call it a drive-cation -- which included five days in Maryland/DC and then three days in, or at, or down, the Jersey Shore. They made the trip because Laura's sister Linda and her husband Richard and their fantastic kids were coming east from L.A. to see DC and go down the shore, so Laura and the family decided it was a perfect opportunity to glom on to their plans and go along for the ride.

Literally.

Laura's friends and loyal brant readers know that one of the (many) things Laura hates more than carrots is flying, so taking a drive-cation is one of her favorite things to do. She packs up the car, sets Ben up with DVDs and her Nano in the backseat, makes sure the dog is in the crate with a big fluffy $2 faux bone from Petco, and prints out a whole stack of mostly wrong Mapquest maps and sets out across the great frontier that is her road trip thinking her deep thoughts. This time was no different -- the DVDs, the Nano, the dog, the faux fluffy bones, the deep thoughts -- except for the fact that there were no Mapquest maps.

There was a GPS instead.

Yes, Laura got a GPS for her birthday and this was the first time she was going on a real road trip with something other than a stack of printouts and her lousy sense of direction. She ended up using the station wagon that has a Stonehenge-type-built in GPS with a cumbersome and annoying GPS already it in (the car that Brendan always drives) and left her brand new stylus-pen touchscreen no-frills unit at home), and she ended up having a completely ridiculous and infantile meltdown somewhere off I-84 because she couldn't figure out how to communicate to the GPS that she wanted it to calculate her route from Newton to Maryland via the Tappan Zee Bridge, not the George Washington Bridge -- anything to avoid the traffic sinkhole that is I-95-- but aside from that, and aside from the fact that it literally took almost 15 minutes to set the fucking thing every time they went somewhere, it was an amazing way to travel.

Laura's actually been reading a lot lately about how navigational systems in cars are changing the way people relate to each other -- she's thinking specifically of an article that ran recently in the NYTs about how couples are fighting less because they're not getting lost as much (she can't find the link but will add it when she does)-- and she'd like to add, just for the record, that she thinks this is absolutely ridiculous. Couples aren't fighting less because they have GPS units in their cars -- they're just fighting differently. Because the GPS instructions are so incredibly confusing and annoying. Every time they set the GPS on this trip, the monitor became a kind of test -- how to read the instructions, or more exactly, how to interpret the instructions the GPS was giving them. Did the yellow arrow on the upper left corner of the screen pointing to the right mean take a right right now? Or did it mean, take a right later. In a little while. You know, when you feel like it. Did the thick blue highlighted road mean the road they were on, right now? Or the road they were trying to get to next, in 04. miles, the way it said in the upper right corner of the screen?

Their differing interpretations -- sometimes vastly differing interpretations -- of the instructions on the GPS -- reminded Laura of why she got such shitty scores on her SATs (and GREs): because she could never really understand the questions. I mean, she understood the questions, sort of, but after reading the question the first time she would start to have questions about the question: did the question mean this? or did the question mean that? did it mean this AND that? or THAT and THIS? Half the time she got so confused about the question itself that she had no idea what to pick for an answer. Which is exactly what happened while driving. Half the time she would get so confused about what the GPS was telling her that she would end up getting lost anyway.

Parsing out the directions was, though, a small part of an otherwise great trip. A trip during which lots of small thoughts occurred to Laura:

-- After her 10 1/2 hour drive from Newton to Maryland two Saturdays ago in her black Volvo XC wagon, Laura realized that hers was the only wagon without a Thule storage unit on the roof.

-- After walking the boardwalk in Ocean City, NJ, she realized she was the only 47-year-old-mom without a tattoo.

-- After days of super-high humidity, Laura realized her hair had gone horizontal and there was nothing she could do about it.

-- After eating crap for 9 days, she realized she was sick of eating crap and wanted to stop.

-- After paying almost $45 to get into the Spy Museum in DC (not including parking) and paying over $50 for lunch at the otherwise free National Portrait Gallery, Laura realized sightseeing in the Nation's capital wasn't as cheap as it was back in 1972 when she went with her parents.

It had been a pretty long time since Laura had taken a family-type vacation -- the past few years had been kind of complicated and difficult for a variety of reasons and she'd had to forgo this type of thing. But after a terrific 9-days, a few bigger thoughts occurred to Laura, too, including realizing that:

-- Life is short and kids grow up all too quickly and even though three extra nights at a hotel feels like it's going to almost break the bank she should break the bank anyway because her niece will never again be 14 and eavesdropping on her son and nephew talking about skateboarding and school is priceless.

-- Memories of family vacations, especially good ones, have a very long half-life for children, which is why she should do anything to take them.

-- Life is good, and she is lucky, no matter how she mis-reads the map or mis-interprets the directions.

Writing a Good Bio

2009-08-04T10:12:00.011-04:00

Laura's been kind of obsessed lately with networking -- and "kind of" is kind of an understatement (kind of!) -- so she's been spending a lot of her time ("a lot" is kind of an understatement, too) on-line on every single social networking site known to man. This includes Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, and she has to say, while she's been ambivalent about these sites for a long time, wondering if they waste more time than make good use of time, she's definitely not ambivalent anymore.

For one thing, she sent an email to lots and lots of friends on Facebook -- friends in publishing -- editors and agents and authors (Laura's not bragging, just trying to make a point) -- to let them know she was interested in ghostwriting and collaborative work and she got a great response! From everyone! Except from the Facebook Team who threatened to shut down her account because apparently you're not supposed to send around a giant email letting people know you're interested in gainful employment. Instead, you're supposed to set up a "Page" of some kind to "advertise" and "promote" your "services" but that seems like an awfully passive way to go about expanding your work-sphere compared with just being direct.

Then she went on LinkedIn and had another positive experience (and no one there threatened to shut down her LinkedIn account. At least not yet.)

Twitter proved to be the biggest surprise because while Laura had been slow to realize how fun Twitter is with its 140-character micro-blogging business, she didn't have a clue that it was a good networking and friend-making tool, too.

First of all, she became excellent "Twitter" pals with an author she loves but has never met -- Julie Klam, whose book Please Excuse My Daughter is the funny but really moving memoir Laura wishes she wrote (for a rave review by a #1 NYTs bestselling author, go to www.jenniferweiner.blogspot.com). Laura and Julie share a mutual friend, one of Laura's bestest [sic] friends of all time and book publicist-extraordinaire, Marian Brown, and Laura and Julie were Facebook "friends," but somehow the immediacy of Twitter really cemented their virtual-friendship.

Not that Facebook doesn't generate that same potential "heat" for making Insta-LUV-friends: Laura and Jane Green, another author Laura has never met, have had some great exchanges on FB, and Laura and Stephanie Green (no relation to Jane Green) met on Facebook (both are breast-cancer peeps -- Stephanie's amazing blog is www.dishalicious.blogspot.com and will hopefully provide tons of material for the book she's working on) and recently had a fantastic lunch together in Boston when Stephanie was in from Miami. (Laura's sure she's forgetting a few other Insta-LUV-friends and will update this post later with additions...)

Back to Twitter, though, which started out being the point of this post: Laura ended up answering a Twitter query from Marci Alboher -- Marci, until recently, had a blog for the New York Times based on her terrific book, One Person/Multiple Careers, and currently guest blogs for Yahoo on her new blog, Working the New Economy. When Marci tweeted that she was looking for people with interesting bios (resume-related), Laura sent her a quick message with a few suggestions (namely, writer Tom Perrotta whose website bio is hilarious).

(Before Laura goes any further she wants to apologize for all the name-dropping which isn't the point of this post [you might be wondering: What IS the point of this post? Good question...])

Anyway, Laura and Marci had a great exchange and it turned out that Marci included a link to Laura's third-person-website bio in the blog she was writing about bios -- which is the point of this post. Here's the link to that post and Laura is not only grateful to Marci for the mention but would like to share Marci with anyone who reads this because Marci has some of THE best and most interesting and intelligent advice about staying relevant and hire-able in this ridiculously awful economy.

Vows

2009-07-12T22:51:00.005-04:00

Laura's posting the link to the "Vows" piece she did for this Sunday's New York Times -- a great couple, Victoria Rowell and Radcliffe Bailey. Laura's done a bunch of these in the past and she has to say that this one was her favorite -- despite the fact that she had to go up to famous people (e.g. Samuel L. Jackson) and interview them (Laura's really shy in case you didn't know it) and despite the fact that being in the midst of someone as fantastically and naturally beautiful as Ms. Rowell made Laura feel, well, like another species. But what incredibly accomplished people and what a wonderful love story, which, of course, is what these Vows pieces are all about.

Laura would like to add, just for the hell of it here since it won't do any good, but she really wishes the part about how the groom's work is collected by over 25 major American museums (Corcoran, Smithsonian. Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan, to name only a few) hadn't been edited out (it was in the last draft she received from the Times to look at).

Memoir with Braces

2009-06-26T12:55:00.007-04:00

Laura probably shouldn't say anything -- she should probably have a chapter or a page or a paragraph or even a line done before she starts shooting her mouth off about starting something new, but she just can't help shooting her mouth off about the fact that she's starting something new.

Or, thinking about starting something new.

Or, probably more accurately, dreaming/imagining/fantasizing about starting something new.

Something new in the way of a book type thing.

Laura doesn't mean to be coy when she calls it a "book type thing" -- starting a new book, or more acurately, dreaming/imagining/fantasizing about starting a new book is always really stressful -- stressful enough to make her not want to do it! -- so she thought she'd call it something other than a book and "book type thing" seemed close enough without being too exact.

Writing about her life -- her early life -- her life as someone with braces*, for instance (*braces being merely one visual symbol of her emotionally [or orthodontically] imprisoned youth) -- has been something she's thought about for a really long time -- especially since she moved back to her home town for no good reason after bragging her whole entire life that she was the least likely person to move home to her home town. In fact, one of her book editors -- the one who edited Piece of Work, told Laura after rejecting her book on failure -- yes, the failure book that failed!! ha ha ha!! (or, LOL for younger brant readers) -- that what she should really do is write about what it was like to move home to her home town after bragging her whole life that she was the least likely person to move home to her home town.

At the time, coming face to face with the giant massive billboard of her own egregious pathology -- what the fuck was she thinking?!?! didn't she know living a mile away from the temple where she went to Hebrew school would spawn the biggest dissociative regression of all time?!? -- seemed impossible. She was, after all, in the middle of the aforementioned biggest dissociative regression of all time since there was nowhere she could go without that giant massive billboard of egregious pathology being completely visible. Writing about herself -- namely, writing about her own stupidity, just didn't seem like something she wanted to do right then.

Not that she hadn't written fluently and with great glee about her own stupidity in the past! Why, just look at the marvel that is/was Animal Husbandry with it's self confessed supreme gullibility and willful ignorance of the fact that someone she -- oops, I mean, "Jane" -- was still in love with even after he had dumped her (stupid fact #1) was dating someone new right under her nose at work! (stupid fact #2) (Read the whole book to find all the stupid facts in it.) (Including the shockingly stupid fact that even after finding out that he was dating someone new right under her nose she was still in love with him!!!)

But even though Laura had written about stuff like that, she'd always written about it in her trademark (<--pardon the self-important "labeling" of her style as "trademark") thinly disguised autobiographical fiction -- something she'd written a lot about, too: for she had no shame not only using all her past stupidities (for some truly epic stupidities find a copy of Her and enjoy!!) as material but telling everyone how she used her past stupidities as material by turning it into thinly disguised autobiographical fiction!

She had, though, never really written about herself - her life, her family, her true thoughts and feelings -- in actual non-fiction. Straightforward, non-inside-out-non-fiction-into-fiction. Except in her brant. And even there she wrote/writes about herself in the third person.

Hiding. Always hiding.

And so for some reason recently, out of the blue, little synapses started going off in her head, little flashes of light that made her want to write about things she's never wanted to write about -- or, actually, she'd never been brave enough to write about -- not because there's any Running with Scissors type stories in her past -- far from it, unfortunately! -- but because she'd always assumed it would be boring and because she's always been kind of a puss when it comes to being honest with herself.

Laura wishes she could point to some wonderfully memorable symbolic line-in-the-sand type moment when she realized she simply had to write about her life and couldn't remain silent a minute longer -- but she can't (except for the past week when two important people in her life told her she start looking inside for what to write about instead of looking outside). All she can say is that she figures she should take advantage of that giant massive wonderfully bittersweet billboard that's been telegraphing the painful merging of her past and present -- a merging she herself was responsible for and is only now just beginning to understand -- before it gets replaced with an image of lame apathy.

And so she's going to take the plunge and start peeling back the layers. She'd like to do it really fast -- like, over the summer -- but she knows that the onion she's peeling is bigger than she'd like to admit and more stubborn. It's an onion that doesn't want to be peeled -- or, at the very least, is ambivalent about being peeled -- and even though right now she's lost in this bad cliched metaphor -- Is Laura the onion or the peeler? or both?! -- she knows that there's going to be some tears involved.

Enough for now. Laura's got to go find a peeler...

Newsflash: Laura Left the House and Saw a Movie!

2009-06-24T16:53:00.011-04:00

It's a(nother) rainy day (duh) here on the East Coast and Laura finally hauled herself out of her house and out to a coffee shop for a change of scenery. She's not going to lie -- she's been feeling pretty, well, uninspired lately and one of the things that happens when she feels uninspired is that she kind of forgets to leave the house (you know, for reasons other than pick up or drop off, food shopping, shrink, Ben's music lessons, etc). She doesn't actually forget -- she just forgets to remember that leaving the house and changing her scenery is an option.

Yesterday she really shook things up -- she actually went out to a matinee movie -- a 3 p.m. showing of Sandra Bullock's new movie, "The Proposal" that she'd heard was hilarious and had earned, through this alleged hilarity, to claim the #1 spot at the box office this past weekend. Laura can't believe she just said "#1 spot at the box office this past weekend" like she knows anything, but it and the great reviews sure sounded like selling points, and so she decided to go against her normal routine of staying home in the rain and pretending to work and shake things up a little. She recently even started Twittering so she thought what could be better than a cheap afternoon movie and a little mini-micro-tweet-branting?

She was a little embarrassed leaving the house and going out into public with her ridiculous Jew-Fro from all the rain and humidity but she shouldn't have been because hitting a suburban movie theatre at 3 in the afternoon isn't really "going out into public." The only people there besides the two teenagers selling tickets and popcorn were about 4 or 5 or 6 senior citizens, getting their discounts and their teeny-tiny little cupfuls of popcorn (sidebar question: did you know that at the AMC theatre chain there's the 'kiddie' cup equivalent 'Senior Size" cup of popcorn? and when Laura says "cup of popcorn" she literally means CUP of popcorn. It was served in a small paper cup, the kind they give away for free to cheapskates like me to get water at the water fountain -- not the big giant super gulp size with the Coke logos all over them).

Laura also realized that she was wrong about it being a cheap afternoon -- the "matinee" ticket was $8 and the non-senior citizen small size popcorn was $4.75 and that plus all the text messages and "Tweets" she sent from her phone about her big day out probably put her over the $50 mark. (Just kidding. Probably over the $100 mark.)

But this was all worth it once the lights went down because Sandra Bullock was hilarious -- Laura would like to go on record here and now and say that she has always been a huge and unabashed Sandra Bullock fan because of her incredible comic timing and willingness to make herself look completely ridiculous and do absolutely anything for a laugh while somehow being able to jerk a tear from Laura every single time (okay, maybe not in Speed, but how she managed to do that in "Miss Congeniality" Laura has no idea). Ryan Reynolds was also hilarious though of course she's not demented enough to pretend to herself or her eagle-eyed brant readers that Ryan Reynolds' comic timing is all she's interested in. Because that would be a lie. And while Laura doesn't brant that often when she does she tells the truth. And the truth is that Ryan Reynolds is entirely celebrity-crush-worthy and even quite possibly (God strike her dead) a Hugh-Jackman-replacement.

(Laura figured she'd give that last line a second or two to sink in.)

Of course, one of the real reasons she went to see a movie was because she figured that she should start seeing movies if she wants to write them. She may not have branted about this yet, but Laura did actually just finish polishing her first attempt at screenwriting -- the adaptation of Piece of Work (her fourth novel)(which had been optioned by Tom Hanks' company Playtone)(but the option lapsed a long time ago and Laura only now got around to trying her hand at writing the script and hopes her agent will be able to re-sell it). She's really happy with it, believe it or not, and has to say that she never ever in a million years could have possibly written it without the help of the amazing screenwriting book Save the Cat, by Blake Snyder. More about Laura's adventures in screenwriting in future brants, but suffice it to say that she had a lot of fun -- yes, writing can be fun! -- sort of! -- kind of! -- but not really! -- I mean, fun is relative! -- and hopes to do more of it in the not-too-distant future.

Laura hopes to leave the house tomorrow, too, which would make it three days in a row and give her lots to brant about!

Real Estate Correction

2009-06-01T22:26:00.002-04:00

Laura's friend Wendy sent her an email tonight to let her know that she always checks Laura's "brant links" and when she checked the link to Laura's house listing she discovered a major error: namely, that the link Laura provided in yesterday's brant is to the wrong house! Laura can't bear the thought that people think she lives in this other house that the link went to -- not that there was anything wrong with that other house! it's just not hers! -- so she's not only corrected the link in yesterday's brant but has provided a few photos of her actual house and the correct link in this emergency correction-brant. Feel free to share the new correct house-link with anyone you think may possibly want to buy it.

Thank you!

Back to Branting

2009-05-31T14:05:00.015-04:00

It's been so long since Laura last branted that she can barely remember how to log on and get to the New Post page.

Another measure of how long it's been since her last brant is how many new photos of Hugh Jackman there were to pick from to pimp her brant and get people to read it. Obviously there were gazillions of gorgeous photos, but she didn't want to waste the whole afternoon, you know, staring at photos of some gorgeous person she met once and will probably never meet again -- I mean, seriously, why torture herself with the way things were and aren't now? -- so she just took one of the first ones that came up on Google images so she can jump right back in.

Speaking of HJ, and let's face it, every time Laura brants -- especially after a long hiatus -- she needs to kind of do a recap of HJ news -- just to put her new brant post, and her life, in context. This might sound strange -- because of course it is strange -- putting her life in the context of his life -- but let's just accept the fact that this is the way things go when she's starting up again. Because, you see, deep down, Laura's really shy, and insecure, and doesn't believe that anyone would be reading her brant right now if she didn't have a picture of HJ's unbelievably ginormous bulging biceps up at the top of it.

What struck Laura as kind of strange when she sat down to catch up on her branting is the oddness of her hiatus -- the fact that she would cease branting at a time when Hugh Jackman was more in the news than he ever was before. Yes, okay, so she didn't win the screening of the new movie in stupid Newton, Massachusetts. Who cares. And yes, okay, she didn't win the charity-fundraising Lunch with Hugh Jackman back around Valentine's Day because she didn't have any money to bid on it. But she missed HJ's whole world tour to promote the new Wolverine film and a few other interesting stories about him as well. One of Laura's friends, in fact, Kathy Mintz, someone she knew long long long ago in the old Random House days, has been kind enough to email her really fabulous Hugh Jackman news -- like sightings of HJ downtown and news of his future Broadway projects: Laura will dig these up and share them in a later brant -- and she's really grateful for this and wishes more friends and readers would share their Hugh Jackman news. Because what Laura's really been trying to create here on her brant is a community -- a community of people connected by their interest in Hugh Jackman and his life and his work. And if in between the HJ news there's a little bit about Laura well, then, hey, that's an extra little bonus.

But enough about Hugh.

It's May 31 -- practically June -- and Laura has had a busy few months. If she had to characterize things in one short Twitter-like sentence -- one Haiku-esque line that would capture the essence of the recent past in general and Laura's life of late in particular, she would have to say this:

Laura feels like she is waiting for her fate to be decided.

Or:

Laura can't remember a time when she didn't feel like everything was hanging in the balance.

Or:

Laura feels stuck and wishes something (good) would happen already.

Laura could go on and on and on with these one-liners -- no wonder people are addicted to Twittering, she's suddenly realizing now -- it's like graduate-level branting -- or the Reader's Digest Condensed Version of branting -- one little line that could basically replace an entire 5000 word brant and save her, and her readers (hi Wendy! hi Janet!) some precious time.

And maybe she'll indulge in a few more before this post is finished, but what she really wants to say here, today, is that she feels like her life is up in the air in a way that it hasn't been in many many years.

Laura feels a little bit lost -- which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

For instance, she's trying to sell her house - it's been on the market since early February, and obviously it's a really slow market -- the slowest in decades! what fabulous timing!!! -- and so it's not selling. It will sell -- she knows that -- I mean, it's a great house and someone's going to buy it, she just doesn't know when and for how much because it's a very "unusual" house -- architecturally interesting and a little complicated in the stairs-department -- but, just like people used to tell her when she was "dating" (she puts the word in quotation marks because she never saw herself as someone who was "dating" as much as she saw herself as someone who was looking for human salve), it only takes one. All it takes is one person -- one family, one couple -- without a fear of heights or a fear of living at the end of a dead-end -- and she will be able to take a breath and think about a less-expensive more urban future. Now of course, if her house does sell, she has no idea where she's going -- she doesn't want to make any big decisions or lock herself into another stupid giant mortgage, so that sets up its own anxiety-producing situation: where will she go? where will she live? what will become of her? -- but somehow that is a better anxiety-producing situation than the one she is in now: because the one she's in now just makes her feel completely and utterly stuck and inert.

Laura feels like a bug trapped in amber.

Not that she's complaining or anything -- people have far worse problems than feeling dead because they live at the very end of a dead-end -- literally -- or feeling utterly stuck and inert -- but she's just a little tired of feeling like she has no idea what's going to happen next. And not knowing what's going to happen next is something that's been happening for a long time since her line of work isn't exactly something you can bank on -- even in good times, and God knows these have not been the best of times for Laura's work.

The stress of not knowing where or when her next paycheck is coming from is really starting to take its toll.

Which is an understatement: it's not "starting" to take its toll. It's taken its toll in a big way over the past few years and has aged her enormously, so a revision to that last Twittery line is probably in order:

The stress of not having a steady paycheck is fucking killing her.

Yet despite all her self-avowed pessimism, deep down, in small pockets of life -- like earning a living from her writing and keeping her boat afloat -- Laura is kind of a ridiculous optimist, believing that just when she thinks it's all going to come crumbling down around her something unexpected comes along to save her, work-wise -- that there's always a Hail Mary catch she's going to make -- and Laura believes that now. Which is why she's been throwing an awful lot of spaghetti at the proverbial wall in the hopes that something will stick -- that one of the new irons she has in the fire will turn into something viable and profitable.

Laura feels old and fat.

Which is why she's going to bring this brant to a close -- with the promise of more brants soon -- so that she can go downstairs and use the treadmill. Or take the dog for a walk outside on a day that is glorious enough to almost make you forgot how stuck and inert you feel. Right after this one last Twit:

Laura always forgets how much she loves branting and wishes she would remember.

Hugh Jackman Contest! Please help Laura win!!

2009-04-06T19:14:00.009-04:00

OK. It's been a while since Laura has posted a bonafide Hugh Jackman brant but this one is truly exciting. Laura thanks the fabulous Helen Hill for sending her this clip of Hugh Jackman asking for people to enter the contest to win the premiere of the new Wolverine movie -- "X-Men Origins: Wolverine." It means that the town with the most votes will get the premiere, but more importantly it means that the town with the most votes that gets the premiere will also get HUGH JACKMAN because he will be there for the premiere. Laura knows it's piggy to think she should be able to go to TWO premieres with Hugh Jackman in one lifetime (the first being Someone Like You, of course), but fuck it. She's a pig when it comes to Hugh Jackman and that's just the way it is.

Obviously, Laura's here begging friends to enter the contest with her zip code. Arrangements will be made to transport and house all of Laura's Hugh Jackman Voting Elves if she wins. The contest ends on April 17th and winning town will be announced April 20th so time is of the essence, people. Please vote ASAP.

So watch the clip, then go to the voting site, then enter the contest with this zip code: "02466"

Thank you!!

Ben's Vakay Part II

2009-04-04T21:36:00.000-04:00

Laura's had a lot of shitty jobs in her life, but if she had to pick the shittiest one she'd have to go with the one 12-hour shift she spent working the Drive-Thru at the Burger King in Hadley, Massachusetts, during a UMass/Amherst winter-session in the early 1980s.

That's an actual picture of the actual Burger King she worked one shift at -- and you might be wondering how she got that photo. Well, she got that photo when she suggested to Ben that they make a trip during his vacation to Mass MOCA (the supercool museum of contemporary art in North Adams, Mass) and then drive through Amherst, her old college town, on the way back home from there.

You might be wondering, given Laura's discussion in last week's Bird-on-the-Head brant, why on fucking earth Laura would be interested in taking yet another drive down an unhappy memory lane -- her college years were, she thinks, among the worst years in her life -- and all she could say to that at the little hotel they stayed in at Porches, right near Mass MOCA, she saw a whole bunch of brochures -- one with a Natural History Museum at Amherst College -- and, being in her new Kerouac-ian Road-Trip Frame of Mind, figured it would be fun to show Ben where she went to college and some dinosaur bones.

First of all, they got off the highway in Northampton, a nearby crunchy college town that is part of the "Five Colleges" business (Smith, Mount Holyoke, Hampshire, UMass, Amherst College) in what's commonly called "The Happy Valley." (Seriously, that's what they call it.) This was kind of a lucky accident, given the fact that Laura was "improvising" her way there -- instead of using the exit off the Mass Pike that she normally used to go to UMass, she decided to go a "different" way which she figured would be faster. Whenever she thinks this she knows deep down in the pit of her stomach that she -- the person with absolutely zero sense of direction -- should not be "improvising" her way anywhere. But it was kind of too late for that as she looked for road signs to Amherst and instead took the exit for Northampton since she knew her way to Amherst from there.

All of this is a long way of saying that they parked the car and went to a diner for lunch. It was one of those old fashioned metal diner-car type authentic diners which Laura knew could be really great or really shitty, and, as it turned out, this place was the latter. Laura's not going to name the place by name but she has to say that not only was the food mediocre but she had one of the strangest restaurant experiences of her life there.

This is what happened: Ben and Laura sat down, looked at the menu, and proceeded to argue about what Ben was not going to get -- meaning that Laura had to narrow down his carb-choices from like 6 to 2. Whittling down the tempting options to "French Toast" and "Nacho Fries" (fuck it -- it was vacation, she thought) they waited for the waiter, a big guy, probably in his late thirties, who was actually very friendly and kept Laura's coffee cup constantly full, to swing by and take their order.

Since they had no idea what "Nacho Fries" actually were, Laura asked the waiter about them. "They're French Fries with nacho-cheese dipping stuff on the side." Laura's certain her face must have fallen -- she could just imagine the sad little cup of microwaved liquid neon orange cheese -- but she ordered it anyway. As she already said, it was Ben's vacation and she thought WTF.

About five minutes later, the waiter brought the basket of Nacho Fries to the table -- incredibly hot incredibly greasy fries in a small plastic basket on top of an unabsorbant sheet of waxed paper. Nestled in the basket of greasy fries was the sad little cup of micravied liquid neon orange cheese, just as she'd pictured it, and as she stared at it and thought how grotesque it all looked, the waiter stuck his food-service-plastic-gloved hand into the basket and grabbed a fry, then dipped it into the cheese dip. "Looks like I'm going to have to try one!" he said as he put the cheese dipped fry into his mouth and chewed loudly. And then he turned and walked away.

Laura's mouth dropped, and so did Ben. Never in her life has she had a waiter so brazenly try food upon serving it.

After that, the day just wasn't the same. I mean, how could it be?? But they continued on down Route 9 toward Amherst and that's when Laura saw the Burger King, still there after all these years. She had told Ben about it many times -- how she worked one drive-thru shift on one winter day years and years ago; how she had to wear the disgusting Burger King uniform which was a brown polyester tunic and elastic-waist pants with one red stripe (ketchup) and one yellow stripe (mustard); how at the end of the long day learning the drive thru thing and manning the "flame-broiler" (a giant toaster oven with moving heat belt that the frozen hockey-puck burgers rode) she had to help clean the entire kitchen area -- a place where every single stainless-steel machine and counter and hood came apart and got hosed down; and how after all of that she had to mop the entire restaurant -- you know, with one of those giant heavy wet mops and metal buckets --and how it was a work-shift that almost killed her.

(Note: Laura had endured and even flourished during her tenure at the International House of Pancakes near Cambridge working weekends and the graveyard shift during high school and college vacations so readers shouldn't assume that she was a puss when it came to hard labor.)

Anyway, after pointing it out to Ben who was long past his love of Burger King kid's meals, they finally arrived in Amherst. They parked, found the museums on the Amherst College campus, thought they both kind of sucked, and got back in the car and drove home.

Book Jackets

2009-04-01T17:13:00.006-04:00

Maybe it's just Laura, but don't these jackets look incredibly similar? Both have one-liner titles! That end with exclamation points! Not that there's anything wrong with the similarity between the two -- it's not like Laura's complaining or anything. She just figured she'd post them next to each other to see if anyone has an opinion....

Scary Carrot Nightmare Photo

2009-04-01T17:11:00.007-04:00

Laura feels like she's channeling the fabulous The Mock Dock site by posting photos and then commenting on them but she couldn't help sharing this photo because it embodies everything Laura fears most about orange vegetables: namely, having a whole bunch of them in your mouth and a giant bowl of them nearby. Close friends and eagle-eyed brant readers know all about Laura's fear of orange vegetables -- especially carrots -- and including pumpkin, squash, yams, sweet potatoes (but NOT including orange peppers)(or orange FRUIT). Anyway, here's the explanation of the gag behind the "Carrot-Off":

"Legendary actress Glenn Close sat down with Jimmy Fallon Tuesday night and ended up shoving a bunch of baby carrots in her mouth.

Jimmy showed a picture Close had brought of her daughter with 42 baby carrots in her mouth after a family competition, then pulled out a bowl of veggies for a carrot-off on the show.

Close easily prevailed as she tucked them expertly up by her gums and Jimmy had giggle fits."

That's all Laura's going to write about this because looking at the picture is making her want to gag. But she's wondering if she would still hate carrots if someone slipped her one of those purple ones. She thinks she would....

Bird on Laura's Head. Literally.

2009-03-29T13:34:00.012-04:00

Close friends, shrinks, and eagle-eyed brant-readers will be familiar with Laura's "Bird on her head" issue -- a phrase that came from one of Laura's oldest and bestest [sic] friends, book editor extraordinaire Julie Grau. Julie came up with this phrase to describe the look a certain boss of Laura's gave Laura every time she opened her mouth to say something. The boss would tilt her head and then stare at her, mystified, as if, Julie so rightly described, Laura had a bird on her head.

One of the reasons that phrase and that issue "resonated" so deeply with Laura is because she realized she'd spent most of her life dealing with people who looked at her in that exact same way -- as if, as Laura had always described it herself non-metaphorically, she was "weird." Sometimes people would actually give her the bird-on-the-head look AND say she was weird, but most of the time it was just the look. And believe Laura when she says that the look alone was, is, and always will be enough to make her feel like a giant loser.

Laura's trying to think of easy-to-describe examples of incidents where she got the total bird-on-the-head look -- besides every encounter with her aforementioned former boss who thought Laura was just 100% weird and bizarre and strange and God knows what else.

There was Laura's year-long 6th grade obsession with buying boys' Levis and boys' Jack Purcell sneakers - as was the rage in the early-mid 70s -- girls wearing boys clothes or the lines between boys and girls clothes blurring -- just ask The Gap which opened it's first gender-blurring clothing store in San Francisco in 1969 -- that made her mother give her non-stop bird-on-the-head looks.

There was Laura's insistence on wearing a three-piece brown corduroy suit (skirt, vest, jacket) for her bat mitzvah instead of, say, a fucking dress.

There was the time Laura dropped out of her graduate MFA writing program after only two days (total bird-on-the-head not only from the head of the program but from everyone she knew: friends, family) because it just didn't "feel" right.

The time Laura told some highly-ambitious ivy-league bound high-school acquaintances that she wasn't going to get Stanley Kaplan SAT tutoring because "she didn't believe in it."

The time she had a "college rejection" party to offset her embarrassment at having gotten rejected from every one of her non-safety schools because of her stupid fucking non-belief in SAT tutoring.

The time she told her Stanford-bound ex-boyfriend that she wasn't going to get Stanley Kaplan GRE tutoring because she "didn't believe in it" even though the last time she refused test prep classes her scores sucked so bad she didn't get into any of the colleges she wanted to get into.

The time she retook her GREs and English Subject Test -- still without taking any standardized test-taking-preparatory classes and -- big surprise!! -- and told a few close friends that she got the same appalling and embarrassingly low scores that she did the first time she took them.

The time she told her closest girlfriends that she wasn't going to wear anything special to meet her new boyfriend's ex-wife because "she didn't believe in that kind of thing."

The time she told her close friend that she was going to her 25th high school reunion when her close friend knew that she was completely 100% miserable in high school, mainly because kids gave her the bird-on-the-head look every minute of every day because she wore long skirts and boots instead of preppy kelly green sweaters and chinos.

The time she told that same close friend that she was so deeply depressed after attending that 25th reunion she needed new medication and couldn't understand why.

The time she told her matchmaker Patti Novak that she'd written half a book about failure and that it had failed to sell to a publisher -- during their first dinner together when Laura was "auditioning" to be her ghostwriter.

The time she told one of the geniuses at the Apple Store genius bar that she wished one of them just once would fucking say "I'm sorry for the inconvenience" for her having to bring in her dead MacBook four times to be shipped down to Tennessee for repairs.

Laura could go on and on and on here with bird-on-the-head moments -- and she'll probably check back every now and then to add more and to see if any of her readers will be inspired to share their own bird-on-the-head stories. But the reason she wrote this post today is because when she and Ben spent some time with her nature-obsessed amazing-cook writer-friend Jenny from 7th grade -- one of the few people who has never ever given Laura a bird-on-the-head look -- Jenny took them on a bird feeding walk. This essentially meant that they put birdseed in their hands and held their hands up straight and flat so that the birds would fly down and eat right out of their palms. But Jenny also did something else: she put birdseed on top of Laura's hat and on top of Ben's hat which -- drumroll please -- caused the birds to fly down and sit on their heads! Hence some real-life actual bird-on-the-head photos.

Laura's main mission in life as a mother is to never give Ben a bird-on-the-head look and to try to keep him away from any and all horrible stupid annoying small-minded unimaginative non-creative un-weird people who could possibly give him a bird-0n-the-head look (not that all the people who gave Laura bird-on-the-head looks throughout her life were horrible stupid annoying small-minded unimaginitive non-creative un-weird people -- but you know what she means...). So it's deeply ironic to her that she actually has pictures of herself and of Ben with birds on their heads...

And not only that: the photo above is doubly perfect because it shows Ben giving Laura a bird-on-the-head look because she literally has a bird on her head!

Fried Dough is the New Hugh Jackman

2009-03-26T12:28:00.011-04:00

Fried dough is the new Hugh Jackman. This unscientific announcement is based on yesterday's brief paragraph about Laura and Ben discovering a place in Watertown that serves fried dough (in perfect bite-sized chunks) all year round which drew more than a few passionate comments about....fried dough. Technically, brants about Hugh Jackman -- anything to do with Hugh Jackman -- have drawn many more comments than her brief mention of fried dough yesterday but you get the drift. Helen Hill, Laura's new friend from L.A. (Sidebrant: Laura and Helen met in the parking garage underneath the Skirball Center after Laura's panel on Chick Lit back in January. They had so much to talk about there that they ended up taking the conversation out of the parking lot and onto email and then again onto Facebook where Laura regularly receives incredibly helpful and thoughtful and intuitive emails from Helen about the various things Laura is going through these days - oh did Laura happen to mention that Helen is a therapist?!? -- more on Helen eventually.) Anyway, Helen provided a link on Facebook to the Hungarian version of fried dough called Langos (or krumplislangos, langosh) -- here's a link she included to a site about "Ethnic Doughs" with a page called "Fried Dough Around the World" -- further confirming the fact that every culture has it's fill-in-the-blank: pizza, knish, ravioli, etc. The Italians have zepolle (little fried dough balls available at Saints Festivals), New Orleans has beignets (note: Laura is aware of the fact that if this were an SAT she would get the stupid question wrong because obviously "the Italians" and "New Orleans" are not comparable in their congruity [whatever that means], and the only reason she's saying "New Orleans" instead of "France" is because she actually ate beignets when she was in New Orleans about 15 years ago on Publicist-Duty and never ate them in France -- Laura's brant, as her loyal readers know [both of them] [hi Wendy] [hi Janet] is about authenticity, if nothing else), and if Laura had the time she write a whole long brant about other cultures/cuisines and their own versions of fried dough. But she doesn't have time for that. Because she has to finish her brant and spend the rest of the day taking Ben to his music lessons and his rehearsal for his next show, The Stones, and making sure the dog has pooped and peed a hundred times.

But Laura does have time to post the link to the page in Helen's link that has all of this information! With illustrations and photos and descriptions all right there! Go there and feast your eyes on all the cultural variations of fried dough and tell me if it doesn't make you want to roll yourself around in flour and jump in a fry-o-later....

And oh my God!-- there is even a history page on this site tracing fritters and fried lumps of pastry throughout the ages! Thanks Helen for a veritable treasure trove of information on fried dough!

Ben 's Two Week Vakay: Part 1

2009-03-25T12:36:00.013-04:00

If you're anything like Laura who went to public school her whole life, including college, you have no idea about private schools and what their vacations are like. In fact, you have no idea that private schools aren't called private schools anymore but are now euphemistically referred to as "independent schools." Anyway, Laura learned that this year, along with the fact that "independent schools" have a two-week vacation in the spring -- in March -- instead of one one-week vacation in February and one one-week vacation in April like the loser plebes in public school do. This works out well if everyone you know goes to "independent schools" too, because that way you can all have your two-week March break together and make plans to go to warm sunny sandy places with umbrella drinks and laugh at all the public school kids stuck in school in between their two shitty-mini breaks.

Laura doesn't know anyone else in "independent schools" -- except for the kids Ben knows in his "independent school" -- and lucky for Laura the economy sucks otherwise she's positive most of them would have been away on real vacations instead of the usual "staycations" that Laura has become famous for during all the years that her own personal economy has sucked. Ben was actually able to have some playdates -- mostly skateboarding playdates with his other friend Ben -- Laura calls them "The Bens" -- and except for having a thousand Jewish-mother-you're-going-to-die-on-that-stupid-fucking-skateboard-even-with-that-helmut-on moments which are really completely unnerving and unrelaxing, especially since The Bens were skateboarding while Natasha Richardson was tragically dying of blunt trauma to the head due to a fall on a bunny ski slope. But Laura did what any modern mother would do to allay her fears -- she made calls and checked her email on her Blackberry and tried to ignore the fact that skateboarding is an incredibly dangerous sport that she wishes she'd never let Ben try, let alone do.

Let's just say, too, for the record, that two weeks is a long time for a kid's vacation. A lonnnnnnnnnng time to have a kid home from school -- a kid who is an only child (except for a puppy) -- a kid whose neighbor friends are not on vacation -- a kid who has (wait a second -- Laura's counting) -- 16 days on his hands. Which means 16 days to fill up with planned activities and interesting things to do and see and learn. Laura's good friend Jenny can vouch for the fact that Laura is not the planned-activities-and-interesting-things-to-do-and-see-and-learn kind of person, not just with kids but in any situation (Laura cites her friendship with Jenny, her oldest and bestest friend from 7th grade, because of all the times Jenny has come to visit Laura and Laura has only wanted to sit on the couch and talk, as opposed to all the times Laura has visited Jenny and Jenny has planned tons of amazing activities and interesting things to do and see and learn). So she's been hitting the Klon a lot the past week as she tries not to panic about boring Ben to death and having him finally realize what a fraud of a parent she is because she is so, for lack of a better word, lazy.

And so, in order to combat the possibility that Ben would finally look behind the curtain and see Laura for who she actually is -- Big Sitting Bum (what she would be called if they were Native Americans) -- Laura and Ben went on a mini-long-weekend-with-a-few-extra-days-attached road trip. They were going to meet up with her aforementioned friend Jenny and her boys and husband, and visit a few other people and places along the way. This is actually Laura's favorite kind of trip because one huge element of fear and phobia is absent: airplanes. Laura will go anywhere -- drive anywhere -- she doesn't care how long or how far -- happily and without complaint as long as she doesn't have to stop foot on a flying deathtrap.

Just like with any trip, packing the car came first, and so they packed the car up with the bare essentials (Laura likes more than anything to travel light), only this time they added the puppy, which threw off the whole packing-light thing. Laura realized as she was packing up wipes and plastic poop bags and treats and food and plastic containers to serve the food in if they were on the road during meal time and chew toys and squeaky toys and rawhide twists and the dog bed and the crate and a thousand other fucking things this one small 9-lb animal needs -- that having a puppy, or any kind of animal, is just like having a baby. Laura's sure this is one of the least original thoughts in the history of human thought -- people for thousands of years have been forgetting to put their pants on when they get in the car for a road trip because they've been too fucking distracted by making sure that their dog has their special organic low-fat biscuits and faux-sheepskin chew kitty -- but it's a completely new and earth-shattering realization for Laura. Not to get gross or anything, but she seriously can't remember the last time she pooped -- that's how obsessed and concerned with and conscious of Friday's bowel movements she's become.

[Brant-erruption: A quick thought just popped into Laura's head -- the phrase Vet-Scam. She thought of this last week when she and Ben brought Friday to the vet for a routine appointment -- you know, the kind where there's one last vaccination and maybe a heartworm pill involved -- meaning the kind where Laura didn't expect to be asked to fork over $204 fucking dollars upon departure. Call her crazy -- and she knows for a fact that the vet place they take Friday to is highly reputable and one of the absolute best -- but WTF?!?]

One of the biggest and most exciting things that happened during the initial part of their Staycation -- before they even left! -- was discovering a pizza place in nearby Watertown -- Stella's -- that serves -- are you all sitting down? -- Fried Dough Babies. Eagle eyed brant readers will remember a previous entry about fried dough -- Laura actually making fried dough in her kitchen the night before Ben's testicular-correcting surgery this past December and almost setting the house on fire. This means that instead of risking death by fried dough you can walk into this pizza place, order a slice of pizza, and then for dessert, a grease-absorbing paper-plate full of little pieces of fried dough covered in powdered sugar. No mess, no carnie atmosphere, no waiting until the middle of July or August for some crappy state fair or festival until you can walk around in the muggy buggy heat and humidity while shoving a greasy piece of fried dough the size of a Dumbo's ear into your mouth. As you can see from the photo at the top of the brant, Ben could not believe what an amazing thing this is: to be able to get fried dough whenever he wants. Of course, Laura is now terrified that she -- the original lover of fried dough -- Big Sitting Fried Dough Bum -- will start visiting Stella's with frightening frequency, even without Ben...

[more about Laura's staycation in the next installment....]

Becoming a Dog Person

2009-03-16T19:30:00.000-04:00

Laura has become a dog person. She can't remember if she branted about the fact that they got a dog almost six weeks ago, but they did -- an adorable Shetland Sheepdog who is almost four months old now. Ben named her Friday, even though they picked her up on a Thursday, and she could not be cuter, despite the fact that no matter how many times a day Laura takes her out in the freezing cold to do her business -- and no matter how many times a day Friday actually does her business outside -- not to mention the fact that they're "crate-training her" (which is really confusing Laura since she's not sure if you're supposed to get the dog to pee in the crate or outside the crate, in which case, why have a crate at all?) -- Friday still manages to poop and pee throughout the house on a regular basis when left unattended for even a few minutes. Laura's trying to find a few minutes this week to Google the fuck (372) out of dog training and puppy training, but until then she's just a slave to Friday, chasing her around the house with a roll of papertowels and that spray that takes the poop

and pee smell out of carpets.
The weird thing about having a dog is that suddenly Laura is being perceived as a dog person which, trust me, she has never ever been. She has never been an across-the-board dog lover -- in fact, Laura has never liked slobbering yapping hyperactive dogs, even when they've been her friends' dogs. She wasn't raised with dogs and that's the difference between true dog people and non-dog people. Now, taking Friday to school to pick up Ben, or taking Friday to the dog park, people -- other dog people -- come up to her and start talking dog business, as if she is a dog-person, too. As with so many other issues in Laura's life, she feels uncomfortable with the fraudulence of pretending to be something she's not, but, then again, maybe she is becoming a dog person after all. More on this later.

Karen Pike, Photographer, and Friend from Hebrew School, is Friday's Official Photographer. Laura can't believe part of that sentence when she looks at it and actually parses it: i.e., the fact that "friend" and "from Hebrew School" could actually co-exist in the same sentence, but there it is, and it's actually true in this one rare case. Karen was even in Laura's Hebrew School carpool, the motion-sick-fest that occurred before and after every day there, and Karen was often the loud one in the car, making trouble. Laura knew Karen a little bit in high school, but over 25 years passed before they saw each other at a high school friend's daughter's bat mitzvah and reconnected. Despite the misery of Hebrew School, Karen is now a happy person -- living in Vermont with her three kids and her wife, Gillian, and a whole bunch of dogs, growing her photography business. Laura thinks Karen's business should grow really big because the pictures she took of Ben and Friday a few weeks ago are probably the best pictures of Ben Laura has and will ever have. Karen, of course, was just snapping a little before she left -- she wasn't even trying to take great pictures -- and Laura can't understand why she can't figure out how to work her Nikon Coolpix well enough to take a decent picture given the fact that back in high school she and her sister had a dark room in their basement! Again, Laura's going to try to get a few minutes this week so that she can also Google the fuck (373) out of photography and camera settings, but until then she's hoping that you'll take a minute to check out Karen's website and blog: www.kpikephoto.com.

Obligatory Hugh Jackman Comments: Okay, let's just deal with the big elephant in the room. Laura thought Hugh was fabulous, and doesn't understand why so many people didn't think so. Clearly opinions were split, as they usually are with such things -- judging Oscar Night's new emcee and new format is a completely subjective task, obviously -- but seriously, Laura can't believe that people don't have better things to do with their time than rip apart hugely talented beyond-belief handsome Oscar hosts for no good reason. Also, Speaking of Hugh Jackman: (isn't Laura always?), Laura would like to call your attention to this paragraph, which ran in a Spanish newspaper -- "Someone Like You" must have recently been released there on DVD or something -- and the reason she'd like to call your attention to it is because her name and Hugh Jackman's appear in the same paragraph.

MADRID, (OTR/PRESS)

Hugh Jackman, Ashley Judd y la oscariza Marisa Tomey son los tres pesos pesados del mundo de la interpretación que comparten escenario en 'Siempre a tu lado', filme que estrena cuatro. Tony Goldwin, actor del 'Último Samurai', que se estrenó como director con 'Un paseo por la luna', dirige esta comedia romántica basada en la novela de Laura Zigman 'Fauna Conyugal'.

Laura would write more, but she has to take Friday out to do her business. Again. For like the 80th time today....

Hugh Jackman Rehearsing for The Big Night.

2009-02-21T08:12:00.003-05:00

This is great new video of Hugh Jackman rehearsing for The Big Night.

All Laura has to say is this: Yum.

Jumping on the Hugh Jackman Bandwagon

2009-02-21T07:31:00.008-05:00

Yes, okay, so Laura kind of fell of the face of the earth for the past few weeks (personal "issues") but in the time she's been away from her brant the world has jumped on the Hugh Jackman bandwagon. Big time.

And can you blame them?

Tomorrow night is Oscar night and people -- people besides the ever dementedly obsessed Laura! -- are getting Hugh Jackman Fever like never before.

Case in point: this article by Joel Stein of Time Magazine. See Joel Stein's face stuck on to the little body next to Hugh Jackman's face stuck on to another little body? Well, Stein was approached by Jackman's producing partner, John Palermo, to help write for the big night. What follows here if you click on the link is Stein's hilarious account of working with Hugh Jackman which confirms everything nice Laura has ever said about him -- based, you know, on one brief 5-minute encounter almost 10 years ago. But whatever. Here's a really great little excerpt:

"The only proof that we really were writing for the Oscars is that Jackman would visit our room for a couple of hours each day. To my surprise, the best kind of boss is a sexy boss. Jackman greeted each of us with a giant hug, which would have been a perfect test of how gay I am, except I was totally focused on making sure I wasn't crushed to death by his giant lats. So ... pretty gay. Jackman would laugh uproariously at everything we suggested, which is one of the huge advantages of writing for a noncomedian. He acted out all our stuff, belted out our songs while standing on furniture and even watched most of Be Kind Rewind with us for no good reason. He was so omniscient in his niceness that not only did he look sad when we played him the Christian Bale freak-out tape, but he also, after agreeing to record a parody of it, called Bale to make sure it was cool if we put it online. He even let me try on the real, $18,000 plastic Wolverine claws, which made me want to do a bit about the moon and body hair; the reaction made me realize I probably should have seen an X-Men movie before writing for Jackman."

ABC News: A Memoir of Mighty Proportions

2009-02-03T18:14:00.001-05:00

ABC News: A Memoir of Mighty Proportions

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"The Mighty Queens of Freeville" is finally here!!!

2009-02-03T18:11:00.011-05:00

Here comes another one of Laura's I-Know-This-Amazing-Person-Who's-Done-Something-Amazing brants -- the kind of greatness-by-association she often engages in, which might sound like name-dropping but which really isn't. After all, Laura can't help the fact that she knows really incredibly talented people who do really incredible things like write great books (like Amy Dickinson) and just happen to also be great friends (like Amy Dickinson). But there's just no way around this one so she's just going to jump right in -- brag-branting about friends be damned.

Laura branted a few months ago about Amy's book, The Mighty Queens of Freeville, which is truly one of the best books she can remember reading. It made her do Oprah's "Ugly Cry" and also do the "Ugly Laugh" a few months ago when she read it in galley-form on the Acela to New York City, and she's been waiting and waiting and waiting for the book to finally come out.

Well it's finally out.

And today is it's official publication date.

And everyone should go out and buy a copy.

And until they can go out and buy a copy, they should go to the book's official site and watch a wonderful book trailer about Amy and her book and about Freeville, NY, which is where Amy grew up and where she returned to with her two-year-old daughter Emily after her marriage ended, and where she lives part-time now, spending the other time being the Chicago Tribune's "Ask Amy" columnist in Chicago. Laura can attest to the absolute authenticity of the trailer because she was in Freeville this past summer for Amy's wonderful wedding (written up in the New York Times Vows section) and it looks just like it does in the book trailer.

Laura can also attest to the absolute authenticity of Amy because Laura has known her for about 12 years, back to the time when they both lived in Washington, D.C. in the Kennedy-Warren apartment building both of them having recently had great career-things happen to them (Laura had quit her day job after Animal Husbandry and had just finished writing Dating Big Bird, and Amy had just added to her NPR freelancing a fabulous new job as "Family columnist" for Time magazine. It was kind of a charmed time because Laura and Amy had both moved up through the building -- as financial times got better -- from smaller apartments to two of the best apartments in the building: Amy in the center 3 bedroom, and Laura in one of the side 2 bedrooms with views of the National Zoo. And unlike most people who live in great apartments, Laura and Amy were actually able to spend time in them, enjoying the views, enjoying the spaciousness of the rooms, enjoying having people over for coffee in the late mornings or late afternoons.

Back in the days of the Kennedy-Warren, when Laura was still single and even after, when Laura wasn't single anymore and was a new mother, Laura would pad down "The Shining"-style hallways of that wonderful Art Deco building, take the elevator a few floors down, and come into Amy's apartment, which was always full of light. Light from the wall of windows that faced the front of the building, and light from Amy herself, who always seemed to be full of something interesting or hilarious to talk about. Amy even threw Laura her baby shower -- on a hot and humid Sunday afternoon, Laura about 50 pounds over her legal limit, and Amy in a signature sleeveless belted Vintage party dress -- a lovely afternoon that someone committed to about 6 hours of videotape that Laura still has somewhere but can't bear to watch because of how little neck and how many chins she had at that point in her pregnancy.

But the best part of knowing Amy then -- and the best part of knowing Amy now -- is that whenever Laura had a problem -- and believe me, Laura frequently has big problems -- she could always count on Amy to talk to. It sounds ridiculous and like the biggest most giant cliche to say that Amy the famous advice columnist gave great advice but it's true -- Amy gives great advice. Just like she did then, and just like she did last week, when Laura emailed her with her latest unfunny life riddle and an hour later she emailed Laura back a wise and true and perfect note.

So Laura feels compelled to brant about Amy and her new book. Not that Laura thinks her brant drives people into bookstores or anything -- she's not that demented! In fact, promoting a book that doesn't actually need promoting reminds her a little of way back when, in 1998, when she went out on her first book tour to promote Animal Husbandry. It was sooooooo long ago (11 years) that Chick Lit wasn't really a thing yet, and Laura can remember going to her signings and readings and telling people about this new really cool book about being single that had just come out in England and that was going to be published in the U.S. in a few months. She knew about the book because one of her closest friends (they knew each other as assistants at Random House decades ago) had a huge job at the time at Viking/Penguin which was publishing Bridget Jones's Diary in the U.S., and he had sent Laura a copy of the manuscript because he thought she'd like it. Of course she loved it, and thought it was hilarious, which is why she started using her platform to inform people about Helen Fielding's forthcoming book. As if Helen Fielding needed her help! But how was Laura to know how absurd it would be for her to be "advancing" for Bridget Jones's Diary when a few months later Bridget Jones's Diary became a monster bestseller that eclipsed Animal Husbandry and every other book written by a female for the next two years.

This feels a little like that in the sense that Laura knows that Amy's book is going to be a monster bestseller -- funny and sad and deeply moving and the kind of book you're really really sad to finish and want to start re-reading immediately -- and it's one of the very very few books that becomes a monster bestseller and actually deserves to be.

Be my Valentine (with some practice) - The Boston Globe

2009-02-01T15:26:00.003-05:00

Be my Valentine (with some practice) - The Boston Globe

Laura already posted this on Facebook, but not every single person in the world is on Facebook, so she's posting the link to the terrific review of Get Over Yourself! in today's Boston Globe here, too. Thank you Caroline Leavitt who Laura has never met but who she's seen on Facebook!

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Laura's Potpourri Part 1

2009-01-31T20:38:00.015-05:00

It was a tough complicated difficult busy week. But finally Laura feels one of those potpourri-type updates coming on, so she's just going to get started and see how far she gets before she has to stop and do something else. She's got a lot of little things to report and a few bigger things, so she'll either cram it all into one big huge long boring brant or break it up into several smaller brants. Here goes:

1. The auction for the lunch with Hugh Jackman that Laura branted breathlessly about last week is really starting to get depressing. Why? Because the bidding is up to $7750 already! -- with the next bid set to hit $8750! At this rate, Laura will never be able to afford it! (Not that she was able to afford it when it was still at $5000, but that's beside the point.) Laura is really happy for the charity that will be the recipient of the money and it goes without saying, of course, that a price can't possibly be put on lunch with Hugh Jackman -- its value goes beyond money -- and she just hopes that whoever ends up with the winning bid in ten or eleven days loves and admires Hugh Jackman half as much as she does.

2. Laura's love affair with the sinfully snarky and Ashley-Judd-obsessed "The Mock Dock" site -- and with "Mockerena," the writer of the site -- continues. The most recent entry on themockdock.com about Laura -- "I Am Angry at Barnes and Noble and Borders" -- involves a visit made by "Mockerena" to her local Barnes and Noble and Borders stores in search of Laura's books, only to find out that not a single copy of any of Laura's books were stocked in either of the stores. Laura is used to this kind of thing -- so used to it, in fact, that she's stopped meandering over to the "Z" section when she's in a store so that she's not disappointed and annoyed that she's bent all the way down and contorted herself into a ridiculously unflattering position (the "Z" sections are always on the lowest hardest to reach shelves) only to confirm her worst author-related fears: that she's become irrelevant in bookstores. Anyway, yet another love-filled shout-out to The Mock Dock -- this time with an added layer of gratitude for the fact that someone besides Laura's parents are as concerned about her lack of bookstore presence as they are.

3. Laura's written before about Nia Vardalos, writer and star of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and how they became friends over the past few years (eagle-eyed brant readers will remember that Tom Hanks' production company, Playtone, had optioned Laura's fourth novel, Piece of Work, for Nia to adapt and star in [though the option since dropped]). As always, Laura hates to appear as if she's namedropping, but she and Nia have had a terrific long-distance email-friendship with even a few in-person visits thrown in. One of those visits took place this past spring when Laura was in LA for her niece's bat mitzvah -- Nia invited her over for coffee and so Laura just hopped in her sister's Volvo wagon and, you know, drove to Nia's beautiful house and, you know, parked out front and walked up the walk and went inside and got a tour of her house and sat in her kitchen and drank really good and really strong coffee with cream (just the way she likes it) and talked and even met Nia's terrifically talented husband, Ian Gomez, who couldn't have been nicer. No big deal. HAAAAA. Laura was especially thrilled to be there because she got to hear about, and actually meet, the little girl Nia and Ian had just adopted. Laura's writing about this now, many months after the fact, because Nia wrote a terrifically moving piece for the Huffington Post about adopting her American foster child, something she'd announced a few months ago to help promote National Adoption Day and The Alliance for Children's Rights. The piece ran a few days ago and got many appreciative and passionate responses, not only commenting on Nia and her husband's happy story but also thanking her for the information about this little-known-about and even-less-understood adoption-option. Here's the link to the piece called "The List" and here too is the link to a piece written by Lisa Belkin for the New York Times' Motherlode blog. Feel free to pass the links onto all your friends interested in adopting....

4. Laura got her photo taken for the "Q&A" piece that's going to run on February 15 on Get Over Yourself! in The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine. Laura's sharing this little piece of news now not just to self-promote her forthcoming self-promotional article, but to comment on how much labor went into a simple picture-taking session: beautificational-labor, that is. Whenever Laura has to have something like this done, and thankfully it's not that often anymore since as you may have heard, her books are almost never found in bookstores anymore! -- she basically has to start from scratch with her external grooming and have everything done. This usually entails 1) haircut 2) haircolor 3) hair blow-out 4) eyebrow shaping 5) manicure 6) clothes. This is quite involved, not just time-wise but money-wise since, as most well-groomed women know, being well-groomed isn't cheap. Looking well-groomed and well-dressed -- well-groomed and well-dressed enough to get your picture taken -- takes time and money, both in short supply with Laura these days. But despite all that, on Tuesday she dropped Ben off at school, ran into Lexington Center to have her hair blown out, went around the corner to have her nails done, and was then going to go around yet another corner to have her eyebrows shaped but there wasn't time. Then she went home, got changed into a new black long cashmere cardigan sweater (Eileen Fisher, on sale) and dress (Diane Von Furstenberg, on eBay), and a new pair of boots (Aquatalia, that she'd bought on sale in advance of her speaking gig in LA -- she figured she should finally get a new decent pair of boots since she's been wearing her beloved black-suede Michael Kors boots for the past six seasons), and did her own make-up because she was just too fucking (461) cheap to pay to have her make-up done. Laura also hates salons and can't stand to be in salons for too long -- she thinks it has something, if not everything, to do with the fact that they force you to sit in front of giant floor to ceiling, wall-to-wall mirrors.

Anyway, once she'd spent the entire first half of her day getting groomed for the photo shoot, she then had to actually sit through the photo shoot, which, is another one of her least favorite author-related things in the world to do. The photographer, Tanit Sakakini, was terrific and lovely and empathetic (she apparently hates having her picture taken, too! oh the irony!), and Laura is keeping her fingers crossed that her incredibly stiff nervous uncomfortable shy body language isn't discernible in the final photo.

5. Laura and Ben are watching Jurassic Park. The first Jurassic Park. (Ben's watching and Laura's kind of watching as she brants.) Laura is reminded of the first time she saw the movie, which was when she was still working at Knopf, Michael Crichton's publisher at the time. The movie had just come out -- the "logo"-style design of the giant dinosaur-head having been designed by genius jacket designer Chip Kidd -- and everyone got to go see a special screening of the movie. This was back in 1993 -- almost 16 years ago which is almost completely inconceivable to Laura at this very moment! [so inconceivable, in fact, that she just redid the math on her fingers to make sure she did it right and unfortunately her highly sophisticated human-digit-calculator method is all-too accurate].

6. Speaking of her days in publishing, the shocking and sad news of the death of John Updike this week was another reminder of the years she spent as a book publicist. Laura spent a whole day with John Updike, back in the fall of 1995 when the Everyman's Library edition of his collected Rabbit novels was published. She remembers taking him to tape the Charlie Rose show, back when the Charlie Rose show was taped from the Bloomberg News Studios on Park Avenue, back before Michael Bloomberg was mayor of New York City, and it was one of the best author-publicizing-and-escorting experiences of her long and highly miserable author-publicizing-and-escorting career. Laura never knew what she was going to get when she'd leave her office to be with an author for a day -- or a week (Julia Child) -- or two weeks (Michael Caine) -- or three weeks (Lauren Bacall) -- and it was often impossible to predict which of the big famous authors was going to be bad and which were going to be not so bad. Or even great. John Updike was one of the greats -- one of the very few: polite and courteous and curious and modest -- everything most authors, especially famous authors, were not. He opened doors for Laura (literally, not figuratively), asked her questions about herself, like where she was from (he lived a great part of his life in Beverly, Massachusetts on the gorgeous North Shore which was and is one of Laura's most favorite areas in the whole world), and what her job was like, and she remembered thinking that he was both a very ordinary person and a very extraordinary person. She remembers, too, bringing him into the green room for that interview -- watching as then Governor Mario Cuomo exited from his taping and meeting actor/director/brother of Penny Marshall Gary Marshall who was waiting for his taping, too. Gary Marshall couldn't have been friendlier or warmer, and Laura remembers thinking what a wonderful moment it was, and rare, so infrequentlyin her line of work were the planets aligned and she felt grateful for the amazingness of her job.

And as she's thinking of this and still watching Jurassic Park, she's reminded of the day she spent with the late Michael Crichton in Los Angeles during one of the annual book conventions, when Laura was in charge of getting him from signing to signing and to various other places. Not only was he one of the tallest people she had ever seen -- he was 6'9 -- but he was truly fascinating, a brilliant conversationalist, and a really nice person.

So many assholes write shitty books, and how lucky Laura feels to have met, however briefly, two of the most amazingly talented and civilized authors the world has ever known.

(Next Brant Teaser: Laura's experience today at a Pampered Chef home party!)

The Mock Dock -- Mutual Admiration Society

2009-01-25T15:15:00.005-05:00

I know I know, twice in one day two days in a row -- Laura can't remember the last time she branted so much -- and she's actually afraid she's going to start annoying people with her self-referential self-promoting posts. But she simply couldn't resist posting a link to this posting about her because it was posted on a truly hilarious blog called The Mock Dock. Laura could have sworn she posted something about this site a month or so ago but she's too lazy and behind in her work to scroll through her own brant to find out, so if she did, just take this repeat as more reason to check out the site. If not, take this opportunity to visit the site and read the hilarious raging entries about topics ranging from those stupid "toxin-removing" Kinoki Foot Pads (mocked on the site which was then picked up by ABC's "20/20" -- giving the site a ton of traffic) to Renee Zellweger to Ashley Judd, which is what the entry she's linking to is about (it references Laura's experience with her on the set -- oops! I mean, on set! -- of "Someone Like You"). The only bad thing is that Laura feels a huge time-wasting session coming on -- one in which she's going to read through the entire site -- and she truly can't afford it right now.

OK. Maybe she'll just read a little....

Post-Obamicon Hangover

2009-01-25T13:25:00.007-05:00

Since Laura wasted so much time yesterday making these stupid pictures, she figured she might as well display just one more fruit of her labor. Patti. Get Over Yourself! is out, it's doing well, and more great publicity is coming. Laura will certainly keep you posted right here about all upcoming television appearances and reviews and articles. She wishes there were an article or some photos about this, but on Friday night in Buffalo Patti was the main draw for the World's Largest Singles' Party, held at the Adam's Mark Hotel. There were 2000 people there, most of whom were there to see Patti. Hopefully, all of those 2000 people went home and bought the book online or got up the next day and went to the bookstore to buy it...

And since Laura is always talking up the great people she knows who do great things, she'd like to point out the fact that her amazing web guy, Jefferson Rabb, whom she'd written about tons of times on her old site, was just written up on the back page of the New York Times Book Review. Obviously, she's pointing this out and providing the link here because, well, Jefferson Rabb designed Laura's site and she's always been extremely proud of the fact that he agreed to do so. She's gotten tons of compliments on the site over the years and this blogspot brant that she slapped together herself is a lame imitation of the original brant designed by Rabb for www.laurazigman.com -- but who really cares. This one works and at least she can post photos* on it -- lots and lots of stupid Obamicon-ed photos she's wasted way too much time making...

[*not that it was his fault that she stopped being able to post photos on the old brant--it was just some weird mysterious completely unfixable glitch that probably had something to do with her stupid Mac.]

Let the Bidding Begin! Win Lunch with Hugh Jackman!

2009-01-24T19:14:00.005-05:00

OK, Laura almost never posts twice in one day -- hell, Laura almost never posts twice in one week! -- and just for everyone's information the photo above is the [uncredited] photo used in the promotion of this officially released news item so Laura didn't waste two hours trolling Google images looking for another 100 photos of Hugh Jackman to use on future brants -- but she just came across this actual piece of Hugh Jackman news: apparently, there's a way to win a lunch with him in NYC -- assuming you have the Benjamins. Up for bidding is lunch for two with Hugh on the set of his new [unspecified] movie, with the proceeds going to the New York Restoration Project. The bidding started at $5000 and is currently up to $5500. Laura wishes she had the money to bid a gazillion dollars to guarantee a lunch for herself with Hugh Jackman, but of course, she's a little short right now. However, if anyone out there has some money to burn for a good cause and a close encounter with Hugh Jackman (remember: Laura can vouch for his genuine charm, friendliness, sense of humor, interesting-ness, you know, like it matters!), go to CharityBuzz.com and place your bid.

Laura's only stipulation is this: you have to take her with you on your lunch date!

HughJackmanObamicon Decoy Photo

2009-01-24T14:49:00.003-05:00

Laura's supposed to be working on her screenplay -- seriously, I mean, it's been over a month since she's gotten any work done -- but she found the make-your-own-Obama-style-icon-photo site and she can't stop fooling around with it. She's transformed photos of her sister-in-law's dog Bumble, her brother-in-law Patrick, her niece Nicole, her son Ben, and while she was trying to figure out who to do next she realized she was going to have to do Hugh Jackman. So here, today, finally, is the latest Hugh Jackman Decoy Photo. Enjoy!

Back From The Left Coast...And Wishing She Wasn't

2009-01-23T11:50:00.007-05:00

Though the first/third person question still hasn't been resolved here on Laura's Brant, Laura's going to stick to the third person today in a short post. She's just back from LA -- a short trip (5 days) to do an event at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles about Chick Lit. She had a great time meeting LA Times Op Ed columnist and author Meghan Daum (Laura's been a big fan of hers for a long time, especially of the essays in My Misspent Youth) and Elisabeth Robinson, whose novel The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters Laura loved and who was fantastically smart and entertaining and funny. Laura would also like to add that she thought both Meghan and Elisabeth looked fabulous -- she loved Meghan's boots (Meghan: if you're reading this: what/who are they?) and loved Elisabeth's jewelry (and clothes)(and shoes). Obviously, the irony of these comments is not lost on Laura: talking about her co-panelists' fashion choices given the Chick-Lit topic, but quite frankly, Laura doesn't really give a shit. She had a great time, met Meghan and Elisabeth, saw two former beloved colleagues (publicists) from her days at Random House, talked to lots of really neat people afterwards, (including two really eerily relevant people in the parking garage of the Skirball Center, one of whom was enormously helpful to her, [thank you so very much, Helen]), got to see her sister and spend time with her niece and nephew -- as did Ben -- and feels free to say whatever she wants right now.

Of course, given the fact that she's exhausted, she doesn't have nearly enough energy to say much more. So she's posting a link to the lecture/event and will write a more newsy update on the trip sometime over the weekend....

Starred Review in Publishers Weekly!

2009-01-20T12:38:00.004-05:00

Get Over Yourself! How to Get Real, Get Serious, and Get Ready to Find True Love Patti Novak and Laura Zigman. Ballantine, $24 (256p) ISBN 978-0-345-51006-8
In their first-rate book, Novak, star of TV's Confessions of a Matchmaker, and novelist Zigman (Animal Husbandry) prove to be a match made in heaven. Novak cuts the bull when it comes to dating advice: you have to know yourself before you can find love. The book exhorts the reader to “Get Over It” when it comes to “thinking all men are jerks” or being paralyzed by past relationship trauma. Like a dating GPS, the book identifies dating obstacles and puts readers on the right road to romantic fulfillment. No shrinking violet, Novak is part drill sergeant (especially when it comes to self-exploration worksheets), part “love therapist” (though she refers on deep issues to the appropriate professionals). Writing in a frank—and funny—manner, Novak uses tough love in offering a compelling and rewarding read for the lovelorn. (Jan.)

Just Like Life

2009-01-11T21:55:00.002-05:00

Watch Patti's appearance on TODAY (scroll down a few brants), then watch this.

Video Recaps | Full Episodes | Webisodes

New York Daily News Loves Patti

2009-01-11T13:30:00.004-05:00

Here's the link to a great piece in today's New York Daily News on Patti and Get Over Yourself!

"Celebranting" and Other Hazards of The New Technology

2009-01-10T13:53:00.010-05:00

Sorry for the lapse. Laura's been a little busy so she hasn't had a ton of time to chronicle her every thought and move (aren't you lucky!). She's still a little busy but here's another one of those nuggetized-brant-updates that have become such a favorite among her readers (both of them).

1) The main reason Laura got busy was because GET OVER YOURSELF! is out and Patti Novak has been on TV. So why are you, Laura, the co-author, so busy? readers might wonder. Well, because while Patti's out there traveling and waking up early and getting hair-and-make-up in various TV studio greenrooms, Laura has had to set her DVR to make sure she doesn't miss Patti's interviews. For most people this wouldn't be so difficult, but despite her obvious flair for branting, Laura isn't a natural AV person. It requires a lot of time and effort in order to be sure that she's got the right show taped during the right time slot and doesn't screw it all up.

2) Even when Laura manages to do this, sometimes there are glitches beyond her control. Case in point: Patti was on the TODAY show this week -- Thursday -- and she was going to be on during the 10 o'clock hour, the one where Hoda Kotb and guests try to get a word in edgewise with Kathie Lee Gifford. So Laura set the recorder, took Ben to school, went to shrink, raced home, then sat in front of the TV, breathlessly awaiting Patti's interview. She waited. And waited. And waited. To make a long story short, at a few minutes past 11, when the TODAY show is in it's 56th hour, a "Special Report" containing President Elect Obama's economic-recovery-speech pre-empted the upcoming segment which was supposed to Patti's. Like the former mentally unstable publicist she used to be and still kinda is, she freaked, in complete disbelief that of all fucking (467) times this should happen. In the middle of her freak-out (good thing Ben wasn't home: she would have ended up owing him several thousand dollars in cuss-fees), she got an email from their Random House editor who said Patti had been fantastic on the TODAY show. Laura blinked. When? Where? Had she missed it? She emailed the editor back and in the meantime scanned almost 4 hours of TODAY show tape -- finally realizing, with a huge amount of relief, that it wasn't her fault: she hadn't screwed up the taping or come home too late -- the 10 o'clock hour of the TODAY show airs in Boston at 11! Hence, it aired at the proper time in most other markets which was great for the book but bad for Laura! Thank goodness for the World Wide Web, because Laura was quickly able to find the TODAY show site, watch the segment, which was indeed terrific, and then post it on her brant.

3) Ditto CNN's "American Morning" yesterday -- minus the pre-empting debacle. Lots of time setting the DVR, and playing back several hours of tape. But it was worth it: Patti was fab. (Sorry: no link or video to post since it appears that CNN doesn't make their clips available.)

4) Of course, with great publicity comes obsessively and compulsively checking Amazon numbers which is what she did most of yesterday. She's not going to reveal them here -- especially since Patti's daughter -- who really is the boss of both of them because she's so smart and exquisitely perceptive -- said it was bad luck to keep checking. Laura's basically stopped, but every now and then she just can't help herself. Like this morning. Still looking good!

5) Several important conference call-type meetings have also taken up some of Laura's precious time -- she's not going to get specific but she and her favorite sister-in-law (on the East Coast; Barbara is her favorite sister-in-law on the West Coast) Colleen are going into business together on a really exciting project. Laura will not utter another word on this except to say it was Colleen's idea and it's amazing, and Laura's just really grateful to be part of making it happen. Stay tuned for more on this when it's time. But it's not time yet. So quit asking.

6) Facebook. Okay, this is really starting to be a problem since she really and truly and seriously could spend most of her day commenting on people's photos, writing on their walls, answering their messages on her wall, changing her status, commenting on other people's status, commenting on other people commenting on her status. Really. Some days it just gets ridiculous! And yet she just can't stop! Cannot stop!!! Especially since she has so many really hilarious and interesting friends on Facebook -- friends resurfacing from elementary school and Hebrew School and high school and the Radcliffe Publishing Course and Random House and Atlantic Monthly Press and all sorts of times and places from the deep deep past she'd thought she'd repressed long ago.

7) Speaking of Facebook, Laura awoke this morning to find a "Friend Request" FROM HER MOTHER in her mailbox. This issue of parents friending children and children refusing to friend their parents is allegedly a world-wide wide-spread problem -- it must be because Laura hears -- from one of her Facebook friends, of course, that Dr. Phil is doing a whole show on this. But never in a million years would Laura have thought that she could be a poster child for this ridiculous sort of modern dilemma. I mean, she's 46, and her mother is 75. Aside from the obvious question of what the f--- is Laura doing on Facebook at the age of 46, what the f--- is her mother doing on Facebook at the age of 75! How did she even find out about it? Does their Temple have a Fan Page? Will they start posting news about deaths and bat mitzvahs on her wall? Is nothing sacred??? Obviously Laura will "confirm" this friendship, since, I mean, how could she not? But she's going to check into the "settings" options and see if there's a way to put up some "parental controls."

8) The Hugh Jackman business got a little weird. Leave it to a bunch of rabid Hugh Jackman fans to kind of put Laura off on the whole business of branting -- positively and with only good things to say -- about Hugh Jackman. About mid week, after the 7th "decoy" photo went up -- the 7th, for the record, containing an actual story about Hugh Jackman that was legitimately related to Laura -- Laura started to notice a hugh amount of traffic (she uses the word "huge" loosely -- relative to her usual amount of traffic, let's say) coming from some group site for Hugh Jackman fans. They picked up the fact that she was writing about Hugh Jackman and then they picked up on the fact that she didn't have a completely positive view of Ashley Judd. Nothing of substance was really said about Laura in those group communications except this: several of the Hugh Jackman fans were annoyed by her use of the third-person. So that plus the fact that she felt like she was being watched -- even though being watched, or being read, was exactly the point of writing about Hugh Jackman! -- made her nervous and she stopped.

9) Laura then had issues with the third-person issue. This is not the first time she's had third-person issues -- but it's always disheartening when she eavesdrops on a bunch of strangers saying how annoying her third-person voice is. It made her want to stop with the 3rd person thing and go straight into first person, which is what I did for one entry -- my eagle-eyed brant readers will know it was that brief posting about Patti's upcoming appearance on the TODAY show where I dropped the charade of the third person and spoke as myself, naked and vulnerable in my first-person-ness. But....like right this second...trying to figure out which way to go....first person....or third person....and not knowing what the right choice is, hasn't been been easy. Hence the cop out of the lack of personal pronouns...Maybe there should be a survey here on the brant -- to find out what readers think--so maybe there will be...later. Laura and I will decide and get back to you.

10) In addition to the issues with feeling nervous about pissing off the Hugh Jackman fans and being embarrassed and conflicted about her third-person issues, Laura had another interesting thing happen while celebranting -- someone commented on her post that included some less-than positive thoughts about Ashley Judd. The person who commented loved Laura's comments because the commenter haaaaaaaaaaaaaates Ashley Judd and has devoted many many posts on their hilarious website, www.themockdock.com, to ranting about her. So reading through all those posts took awhile though it was a happy distraction. Who knew the rewards of celebranting could be so good!

11) Laura is deeply conflicted about this next issue -- so conflicted, in fact, that she's afraid to even mention it here -- the issue of feeling tempted to start running photos of Matt Damon on her brant because she has a huge crush on him, too. Actually, to be really clear on this -- just so people don't think she's one of those creepy losers who has crushes on celebrities since she never has been that kind of creepy loser (she's been a creepy loser for other reasons) -- her crush is on Jason Bourne, hero of all the Bourne movies that Laura watched for the first time this past summer at her super-tall-brother-in-law's insistence. Anyway, Laura was tempted to make this paradigm shift to Matt Damon but couldn't bring herself to actually do it, so enormous were the implications and potential repercussions. More on this to come though. She's thinking about the occasional "guest decoy brant photo" which would give her the freedom to occasionally break out of the Hugh Jackman rut in order to feature someone new who has a 100% bonafide Boston accent.

Patti on TODAY Today

2009-01-08T18:21:00.001-05:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

"Tomorrow" on "TODAY"

2009-01-07T19:04:00.006-05:00

I'll make this brief -- and in the first person, because, well, it's a long story, and I'm not saying I'm going to permanently switch from third person to first, but maybe, we'll see -- but watch Patti Novak talk about GET OVER YOURSELF! -- tomorrow, on TODAY (I love saying that) during the 10 o'clock hour. She'll be interviewed by the terrific Hoda Kotb. Then when you're done watching, order the book. Or better yet, go to a bookstore and buy a copy (or, yes, okay, fine, you can go to the library too and borrow it....).

Let the Book Promotion Begin

2009-01-07T08:57:00.002-05:00

[click on image to enlarge]

Hugh Jackman and the White Leather Trenchcoat Decoy Photo #7

2009-01-02T11:15:00.011-05:00

So here it is. The photos of Hugh Jackman in the spectacular white leather (or pleather, Laura's not really sure) trenchcoat he wore to the New York City premiere of "Someone Like You" back in March of 2001. These, of course, are press photos gleaned from Google images; Laura's own personal photo archive seems to be missing the one or two shots her mother took of Hugh Jackman's left shoulder and ear (she can't seem to take a photo without missing the entire top of someone's head).

Before saying another word, Laura just wants to take a minute to behold the man in that coat. I mean, come ON. Have you ever seen anything quite like it? Few men can pull off a freakin' navy blazer, let alone a white leather/pleather trench coat.

So let's start with the top photo. There's Marisa Tomei on the left, in red, who played Laura's -- I mean, Jane's -- best friend. Laura has always been a big fan of Marisa Tomei's and wonders, probably like most people, why she hasn't worked more in the twenty-or-so years since she won an Oscar for best supporting actress in "My Cousin Vinny" (Laura has heard that it's because she, Tomei, is "difficult"). More later about Marisa Tomei and Laura's encounter with Marisa Tomei's father (hint: it has something to do with Laura bodyblocking her own father as he tried to talk to to Marisa Tomei's father in the theatre itself).

On Hugh Jackman's other side in the photo above is Ashley Judd, the "intellectual"* (*University of Kentucky graduate who took some French classes) actress who plays Laura -- I mean, Jane -- in the movie and who, well, Laura doesn't really want to go into it because she doesn't believe in using her brant to expose jerky celebrities -- even those jerky celebrities who 1) ignore authors on the set of the movies based on their books and 2) stand those authors up when those authors fly all the way across the country with their newborn babies in order to interview them for a cover story in a major magazine to promote the jerky celebrity's role in the movie based on the author's novel because the jerky celebrity pretends to be sick so she can spend time with her boyfriend instead of the cross-country-newborn-baby-toting author-writer. Sorry.

And on the other side of Ashley Judd the Faux-French-Intellectual, is the film's director, the truly wonderful Tony Goldwyn (otherwise known as the "bad guy" in "Ghost" and many other great films). Laura spent an entire day in New Canaan, Connecticut, with Tony Goldwyn and his film editing staff, watching a "rough cut" of the film about 2 months before it was released in order to "help" with some voice-over stuff and having lunch at a cute little Chinese restaurant in town with Tony and a film editor. In typical Laura-traveling-disaster-fashion, it's a trip she remembers less, unfortunately, for the fun she had around the post-production of her movie and more for the fact that about 8 hours after dinner later that same day -- she had driven up to Connecticut from DC with Ben, who was then just 6 months old, and her parents had come down from Boston to watch Ben while Laura was doing the movie-stuff -- she got violently ill with a stomach bug. She was sick -- really really sick -- for close to 16 hours, which is a long time when you're barfing every hour on the hour. Anyway, except for the hour-on-the-hour barfing, Laura had a great time and liked Tony a lot -- he was smart, funny, unpretentious, and very un-Hollywood for someone so obviously Hollywood (need Laura point out the completely obvious fact that Tony Goldwyn is the grandson of Samuel Goldwyn -- the Samuel Goldwyn?) Not to mention quite easy to look at.

OK, so back to the [tenuous] connection between Hugh Jackman and his White Leather/Pleather Trench Coat and Laura. The movie was released in March 2001, and obviously Laura was invited. She can't remember how many people she was allowed to invite to the actual screening and then to the after party (for those people unfamiliar with the movie business, the after party is the party that takes place after the screening -- I know, it's confusing, but just stay with her here), but Laura's "main" entourage/posse included her immediate family and some very close friends. Obviously, there was Brendan and Ben. Then, it turned out, Sarah, then 9, was in DC for her spring break, so she came, too. Then, Brendan's mother drove from DC with them since she wanted to also be in NYC when Brendan's brother was having his first baby (conveniently due on or around the date of the premiere). Linda, Laura's brilliant and non-imbecilic-when-it-comes-to-computers sister flew in on the red-eye from LA -- how L.A.! -- and brought with her her sister-in-law Barbara. Laura's parents drove down from Boston and that completed the familial rat-fuck that was housed at The Regency Hotel on Park Avenue. A babysitter was hired for Ben, who was just getting over some kind of weird diarrhea thing, and all other friends and family -- Brendan's older brother, Patrick, and his wife, Colleen; Laura's oldest and best friend from Newton, Jenny, and her friend from Rochester; and Laura's agent and his boyfriend and a few assorted friends -- came to the theater and to the after party.

The thing that neither Laura nor Brendan expected was how much negotiating and organizing the travel arrangements to the premiere was going to feel like a wedding -- a wedding, Laura might add, that they themselves hadn't even had yet, because at the time they still weren't married (this will be covered in a future brant). While the film studio had arranged their suite and their travel, Laura had to get rooms at the hotel for her mother-in-law and step-daughter, her parents, and her sister and her sister's sister-in-law, and then negotiate the other extremely important aspect of the event: getting from the hotel to the theater. You'd think this would have been the easy part -- it was only about 25 or 30 blocks, after all -- but of course, it was the hardest part, because of the fact that there was a stretch Limo involved. Laura still doesn't understand why it is that otherwise normal people become unhinged when they see a stretch limo and realize they're going to get to ride in it, but it's a fact: otherwise normal people become unhinged when they see a stretch limo and realize they're going to get to ride in it. One of the reasons she doesn't understand this fact is that during her 10 years as a book publicist, Laura rode in about a thousand stretch limousines -- most of the time backwards, reading a schedule or trying to use one of those giant "cell" phones from the early 1990s, and getting carsick -- so to her, the sight of a stretch limousine usually makes her want to barf -- literally. Clearly, she's the minority in this regard, a fact never more obvious than that night as she and her Big Fat Premiere-Wedding party gathered in the lobby.

When it was finally time to leave, there was a whole bunch of stretch limos in front of the hotel -- one for the screenwriter, Elizabeth Chandler, and her big fat premiere-wedding-party-family; one for Tony Goldwyn and his big-fat-premiere-wedding-party-family, and one for Laura and her big-fat-premiere-wedding-party-family. Trying to herd her family into the limo -- her parents, specifically -- was incredibly difficult because they were so busy trying to take pictures of themselves in front of the limo and getting into the limo, probably to show their Temple friends when they got back, that Laura seriously thought she was going to be late to her own premiere. Eventually, though, they stopped taking pictures, and then they all climbed in and arranged themselves -- Laura, by the way, refusing, like the haughty-demanding-celebrity-author she had instantly turned into, to sit backwards -- and the ten of them looking a little bit like a bunch of clowns getting into a Volkswagen -- and the driver started off down Park Avenue toward the theater in Chelsea. Once there they de-limo-ed -- all seven of them climbing out again like clowns -- and Laura was met by a Fox Studio publicist. That's where the real "fun" began.

The publicist, who probably looked just like Laura looked once -- dressed all in black, a cigarette behind her ear, a crazed look in her eye -- directed her and Brendan toward the red carpet and instructed her to walk along the edge where the press was. Laura was to walk directly behind Hugh Jackman and his wife, the publicist instructed, moving forward to each interview as he finished. At first all Laura saw was a blur of white leather or pleather, but then her eyes focused and she realized that there was a man inside the white leather/pleather trench coat and that man was Hugh Jackman.

Laura's going to cut to the chase here, because really, how much longer can this brant possibly be? -- and briefly describe the farce that was the red carpet for her. You see, the media lined up along the edge of the red carpet -- "Entertainment Tonight", "Access Hollywood", People magazine, even radio interviewers, to name only a few -- are there, obviously, to interview the stars: people like Hugh Jackman and Greg Kinnear and Marisa Tomei and the pretentious Faux-French Intellectual. They're interested in the famous celebrities -- NOT in the author of the book on which the movie those famous celebrities are in was based on. What this means is that every time Hugh Jackman would move up for another interview -- the camera lights (from "Entertainment Tonight", for instance), would go on, and they would do a quick excited breathless interview, and then the lights from the camera would go off, and then it was Laura's turn. Only after one or two or three of these stops, Laura suddenly realized that when it was her turn the camera lights didn't go on and the tape-recorders didn't go on and all that seemed to happen was a "fake" "pretend" interview with her that would never air or never see the printed page because the press people she talked to were only going through the motions of interviewing her, not actually interviewing her.

All of which is to say that the red carpet was a complete and utter farce -- except for the fact that Laura got to walk behind Hugh Jackman the whole time. Which was fantastic, except for the part of the red carpet when you face a wall of paparazzi, all of whom , it seemed, were screaming in unison and at the top of their collective lungs, for Hugh Jackman's wife to get out of the fucking way! get out of the fucking way! you're in the fucking way! move! move! move! get out of the fucking shot! so they could take pictures of Hugh Jackman in his fabulous white leather/pleather trench coat. Which, of course, Laura could understand, but did they have to be so fucking rude and crass?

And so there you have it -- today's Hugh Jackman Photo with Relevant Personal Details. More tomorrow....

New Year's Day -- Buffalo-Style

2009-01-01T09:58:00.006-05:00

Okay, okay, yes, Laura is well aware of the fact that she promised a major Hugh-Jackman- photographic-spread-with-relevant-personal-details, but first things first. Because today Laura and Patti awoke to this fantastic piece in the Buffalo News by Anne Neville on GET OVER YOURSELF! (Patti awoke to it, of course, since she's the one who lives in Buffalo.) It's the first actual big spread on the book and not only is Patti splashed on the front page of the Living Section, but there's also a teaser photo of her on the actual front page of the paper, above the fold, and above a picture of Obama! For those of you familiar with the soon-to-be-dead newspaper business, front page of anything is big, above the fold is huge, and above the fold above Obama is beyond measure! So here's the link to the piece and for those of you with single friends, single relatives, single office mates, or friends with relationship problems, relatives with relationship problems, or office mates with relationship problems -- it's time now to start stocking up on the book. Let Patti help you and your interpersonal-skills-challenged friends have the best new year everrrrrrrrr...

Hugh Jackman Decoy Photo #6

2008-12-31T14:06:00.009-05:00

Lest anyone think it's just Laura who's obsessed with Hugh Jackman, let the record show that this photo of HJ -- with his 8-year-old-son at a Knicks game a few nights ago -- ran yesterday on the New York Daily News website. Clearly, Laura's not the only appreciator of Hugh Jackman's fabulousness.

She can't believe she's actually doing this, but as she was poking around trying to find the link to the photo on the NYDaily News' website, she came across a huge amount of photos of Hugh Jackman taken during his recent trip to NYC -- and so because they're so spectacular she's providing the link right here and right now to the Gossip Girls.com website. Laura knows she's just crossed a line -- linking to a celebrity-news website -- and that doing so is a slippery slope -- who knows what she'll do next? -- but she just can't help it: so committed is she to providing her readers with the absolute best* photos of Hugh Jackman. (*Though let's be frank: has there ever been a shitty photo of Hugh Jackman? Laura doesn't think so and she dares anyone reading this to find one and tell her about it.)

And now for the personal connection between this 6th photo of Hugh Jackman and Laura, his 8-year-old son is named Oscar, and it was about Oscar that HJ was talking to Laura and Brendan while crouching down and looking at Ben in his car-seat that miserable day they visited the set of Animal Husbandry/Someone Like You. So as you can see, Laura has a special connection -- a true connection -- an actual connection -- with Hugh Jackman, which is why she feels entitled to write about him and talk about him and exploit him for the sake of increasing her brant readership.

Laura's got a great Hugh Jackman brant planned for tomorrow -- it's snowing in a big way right now, and Laura has to 1) finish this brant 2) take the ornaments off the now-dead and de-needling Christmas tree 3) bake cookies to bring her friends whose house they're going to tonight for New Year's Eve 4) use the treadmill 5) "do" her hair 6) wait for the Fed Ex guy who is allegedly coming with her brand new replacement Blackberry Curve 7) watch about seven more episodes of Drake and Josh, which, quite frankly, Laura thinks is funnier than any grown-up show.

And so on this last day of 2008 -- a year Laura's not particular sad to see close out -- she wishes a great new year to all of her friends, family, brant readers, and, of course, Hugh Jackman and his lovely family (for those of you moving on to the gigantic album on www.gossipgirls.com, you'll see HJ with his adorable daughter Ava [Laura can't believe she knows this without having to fact check the name and spelling right now] and his lovely wife Deborra-Lee Furness who [and Laura will save this for another brant] always gets a bad wrap for being, well, a normally attractive person instead of say a lingerie model. Whatever.)

Happy Official Publication Date!

2008-12-30T15:39:00.008-05:00

Well, Laura can hardly believe it, but today is the official publication date for GET OVER YOURSELF! For those of you familiar with the book publishing business, obviously the "official" publication date means nothing, except that it provides the perfect excuse to toot your horn about your book. When Laura's first four books were published, you know, those novels she used to write, her mother would always call her on the "official pub date" in order to be filled in on the exciting events planned for the day. Imagine her mother's disappointment when Laura, each and every time (and you can double that to include the "official pub dates" of all her paperbacks), had to say, "GEE! There's NOTHING planned for today since today is just the arbitrary date that publishers pick for the 'due date' of your book." Laura could write several paragraphs right here and right now -- the psychic emotional wounds are still so fresh! -- about the long silence on the other end of the phone and the subsequent desperate follow-up questions her mother would bombard her with -- "No advertising? No reading? No review in the paper?" -- but Laura doesn't want to get off on some crazy embarrassing humiliating tangent. Because today's a big day.

Laura still has a hard time wrapping her head around the fact that a year ago today she hadn't even gone to Buffalo yet to spend a few days with Patti and get her first batch of messy notes written with a giant Sharpie on many many many legal pads -- Patti talks fast and says so much great stuff that Laura wanted to get down as much as she possibly could as fast as she possibly could -- and today, a year later, the book is actually in bookstores! Only in America!!! Laura has yet to go to the local Barnes and Noble or to her favorite local independent bookstore, the New England Mobile Bookfair, where she and her technologically-challenged sister both used to work during high school and part of college -- but she hopes to do that later, once she finishes branting. Until then, Laura wants to just take another minute and pay tribute to Patti -- and her great taste in ghostwriters -- just kidding! -- and her truly impressive gift for "getting" people and telling them what they so desperately need to hear.

Laura will be posting information on all the publicity Patti will be doing in the coming months -- there's the Today show, CNN's American Morning, The New York Daily News, Cosmopolitan, just for starters -- not to mention the biggest Single's Mingle ever, arranged by Patti's matchmaking service, Buffalo-Niagara Introductions, and taking place later this month in Buffalo -- but for now, she just wants to thank Patti for choosing her as her writing partner and to wish her a very very happy pub date!

Hugh Jackman Dancing Decoy Photo #5

2008-12-29T22:51:00.006-05:00

Laura is just back from a three-day post-Christmas-but-Christmas-related visit to Rhinebeck, New York, where Brendan's brother lives. Laura took Ben there to see his two gorgeous girl cousins, and also to hang out with his two boy cousins and they had a great time despite the fact that Laura was consumed with the knowledge that her pants were tight. Not that much tighter than they were last week, but certainly tighter than they were last month. Laura feels like she keeps losing and gaining the same five pounds -- especially annoying since, if anything, she should be losing and gaining the same ten pounds -- and yet she doesn't seem capable of doing anything to stop this almost imperceptible (to anyone other than Laura) yo-yo situation. So since she's tired from the weekend, tired from driving, and tired of worrying about her ever-tightening pants, Laura's going to do a quick potpourri-style brant:

1) Just to get it out of the way, Laura wants to point out the second Hugh Jackman "dancing" photo -- the first, for those sharp-memoried-brant readers, being the "Jazz-Hands" photo which was a big favorite among Facebook fans. So here's another "action" pose that Laura thought would be a nice complement to the Jazz Hands photo, though it's a photo lacking in any back-story or particular relevance to Laura's life. Tomorrow Laura's going to post a photo of Hugh Jackman that has a great back-story with particular relevance to Laura's life since it's a photo of HJ taken on the red carpet of the premiere of Someone Like You, the same red carpet that Laura walked, just inches behind HJ! -- so that's something to look forward to.

2) While in Rhinebeck, Laura went with her sister-in-law Colleen and her mother-in-law Jane to see a movie, Slumdog Millionaire. Laura, in her ignorance, hadn't heard of this movie, and figured it was one of those wacky feel-good Christmas-release movies that the whole family goes to see for a little escapist-humor after suffering the misery and sadness of family togetherness. For those of you less ignorant than Laura because you've either seen the movie or read reviews of it, her idiotic assumptions couldn't possibly have been further from the truth! Wacky feel-good escapist humor? Not unless you're a complete sadist who enjoys watching terrible things happen to beautiful Indian orphan children!! OMG. After about the first 10 minutes, Laura thought she was going to have to get up and leave, and after the movie was over, Colleen said the same thing, likening the experience of sitting through the movie to being on a bad theme-park ride -- one with endless twists and turns that makes you wish you could stop and get off. Despite the difficulty of sitting through all of the heartbreaking scenes, the movie was incredibly uplifting and undoubtedly one of the best films she thinks she's ever seen (through her hands that were covering her eyes most of the time). Though Laura's not usually in the movie-reviewing-movie-recommending business -- mainly because she barely ever sees movies because she's such a giant loser -- she strongly recommends that you see it (through hands covering your eyes) too.

3) Even though Christmas already seems like it happened a year ago, Laura would like to thank the four people who commented on her brant about how confusing Christmas is to Jews like her. Not only is she grateful to anyone who comments on her brants, but she was especially grateful this time because the comments were so long and interesting and personal -- Laura had specifically asked for people to help her with her confusion and these commenters actually did that, not only providing answers and guidance on many of the issues of Christmas process and procedure, but also giving wonderful peeks into their families and how Christmas has evolved for them over the years, first as children and now as adults. For other Jews confused at Christmas just like Laura, or for non-Jews secretly curious to know whether they are celebrating Christmas correctly, Laura highly recommends reading the comments from that brant.

4) Laura's sister Linda just joined Facebook. Laura's not sure why she's including this nugget of news in her brant (you know, because she has such a selective editing process for what gets into her brant), but for some reason it just seems like the right thing to do. Linda is two years older than Laura and she lives in suburban L.A. with her husband and two gorgeous kids, and despite being a talented painter and extremely organized and efficient SAHM she is a complete imbecile when it comes to computers. Laura doesn't mean to sound cruel -- I mean, she could sugar-coat the whole thing and make it sound like Linda just isn't that into computers, but Laura's embracing this whole honesty thing right now (more on that later) and needs to come clean about everything and everyone she writes about. So the fact that Linda's one of those people who can't download an attachment and has trouble emailing a photo and who has just recently figured out how to use the texting function on her phone (Laura shouldn't talk in this regard, given the fact that she sent her first text in May -- 2008) means that going on Facebook is a huge leap for her. For those of you on Facebook, Linda's wall is almost empty and so is her profile page, two tell-tale signs of technologically-challenged artiste types -- and Laura just knows that as she sits here branting, her sister is staring at her near-empty Facebook page, trying to figure out how to get some fucking (465) photos of her kids on there and how to search for friends from RISD '82. So if you're trolling around Facebook and feel like doing Laura a huge favor, go find Linda Kosoff Zigman or Linda Zigman Kosoff and friend her so that Laura can stop worrying and get some sleep.

5) Speaking of being technology-challenged, Laura's Blackberry got wet in Rhinebeck on Friday night and she's been without a working "Smart Phone" for almost 72 hours. Over the weekend Laura and Colleen went to three different Verizon stores trying to extort a new Blackberry out of them but to no avail, so Laura must return to the 9th circle of hell tomorrow and hit her local Verizon store first thing in the a.m. Laura doesn't know which is worse, Best Buy or Verizon, but she'll let you know tomorrow after what she's sure will be an incredibly frustrating experience (spoiler alert! Laura is certain that she'll leave the Verizon store without a new phone and will instead have to wait 3 business days for one to be sent to her at home and then go back to the Verizon store to get all her data transferred and the phone activated...)

That's all for now. More tomorrow unless Laura's pants are so tight by then she can't breathe...

Have Yourself a Confusing Jewish Christmas

2008-12-25T11:38:00.023-05:00

Before Laura starts her actual brant, she wants to just say that it took her a ridiculously long time to upload a bunch of pictures to her Facebook page. Laura generally likes to consider herself tech-savvy, though she suspects that people who refers to themselves proudly as tech-savvy probably aren't and are just giant loser-goofballs instead. That said, she couldn't believe that it took her almost 2 hours --who is she kidding? it was more like 3 -- from getting the photos off her camera and onto her iBook and then figuring out how to get the photos in iPhoto to be organized in the right way. Can she also just take a minute to say how much she hates the new iPhoto AND the new iMovie which, to someone as clearly non-tech-savvy as Laura, totally suck compared to the old iPhoto and iMovie that were really really easy for Laura to use. But those old versions are on her old iBook, you know, the one that was the replacement for the one that died four times and that died itself, eventually, too -- a later post on this will follow someday -- about Apple's "Customer Service" policies and behavior (hint: the quotation marks around "customer service" should tell you that Apple has shitty customer service and even worse "deskside manner" while administering that shitty customer service...and don't fucking (461) get her started on those alleged idiot-Geniuses...). Anyway, Laura's kind of "teched-out" right now having spent most of Christmas morning trying to share one stupid album of Christmas photos. She thinks it finally worked -- for her Facebook friends, there are maybe 14 photos to look at -- not much to show for all her labor and all the money she owes Ben for saying the EFF-word throughout the whole ordeal. For non-Facebook friends, well, these 2 here will have to suffice.

So last night was Christmas Eve. And today was Christmas. Laura thinks those things are worth stating, despite the fact that they're completely obvious, because for Jews like her Christmas is always a little bit confusing. There are so many facets to it, so many decisions, so much labor and artistry and list-making involved. Compared to Hanukkah or Channukkah or Chanukkah or however you spell it, it's really overwhelming, which is sort of funny and ironic because it's usually Jews who complicate things and confuse things with thousands of different issues and problems and shpilkus-inducing questions. Non-Jews reading this might not understand why Laura, a Jew married to a non-Jew and thus celebrating Christmas, is so confused, and Jews who aren't married to non-Jews and thus not celebrating Christmas, might not understand her confusion, either -- What's so hard about Christmas? You get a tree, some lights, buy and wrap presents and then keep your mouth shut when Santa gets all the credit.

But this isn't the way Laura sees it. Hanukkah or Channukah or Chanukkah or however you spell it -- now that's easy. You get a menorrah or a mennorah or a mennorrah or however you spell it, stick some candles in, get a pack of matches, make sure all the smoke detectors have fresh batteries in case God forbid your sleeve or hair catch on fire during the nightly lighting, get 8 presents, heat up some pre-made latkes, and there, you're off to the races. And when it comes to what Jews do on Christmas, it couldn't be easier:

The Two Rules for Jews on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day

1) Go to the movies

2) Eat Chinese food

Now compare this to The Agonizing Confusion Non-Jews Feel When Celebrating Christmas:

1) Timing of the Tree-Buying

This is one of the least clear and most confusing of all Christmas issues for Laura: When you're supposed to get the tree. Do you get it right after Thanksgiving, like, the actual day after Thanksgiving, for maximum tree-cost to tree-enjoyment ratio? Or do you wait to get the tree until early December in order to preserve the freshness of the tree so that all the fucking (462) needles don't start falling off the tree three weeks before Christmas? Tree-watering comes into play here in this question, too, but Laura will get to that later.

2) Type of Tree

One of the oldest questions known to man: Real tree or fake tree? Do you join the millions and millions of tree-killers who rip live trees out of the ground for their own personal holiday enjoyment? Or do you skip the selfish tree-killing and opt instead for a fake tree, joining the millions and millions of Walmart and Target and Kohls and Costco shoppers who shlep home a giant multi-part "tree" that you have to put together at home and plug in?

3) Lights

Yet another of the oldest questions known to man: White lights or colored lights. This is one of the most fraught questions having to do with Christmas since it was always Laura's experience and the experience of other's, she's certain, that fancy rich people used white lights while non-rich cheesy people used colored lights. Laura's not sure if this is actually really true, but she's positive she read something about this once and it was definitely an article written by a non-Jew so don't go blaming her.

4) Outdoor Lights and Decorations

This question is sort of related to the above question: that is, it was always Laura's impression that fancy rich people didn't turn their outdoor property into movie sets of the North Pole or Bethlehem and that non-rich cheesy people did. Again, Laura apologizes if her impressions are wrong -- and in fact, she actually knows that her impressions are not entirely correct because right here in her very neighborhood there is a family who is very very rich and who has tarted up their house like a freakin' circus. But still, Laura's never sure if they should be decorating the outside of their house, if even just a little. They never have, but maybe they should next year...

5) Trimming the Tree

Back to the endless confusion about the tree. When do you decorate it? The day after Thanksgiving? Get the tree, put it up, throw the shit on it and get it over with all at once? Or are you supposed to decorate it on Christmas Eve the way they do in movies or in Finland or Norway or somewhere else blond? This question also encompasses the lighting-issue -- white or colored -- and includes the whole sub-topic of ornaments: that is, what kind of ornaments do you get? Theme-ornaments? Matching colored ornaments? Edible ornaments? Like, whatever happened to stringing popcorn on the tree or hanging candy canes that no one ever eats? And what about tinsel??? Laura and Brendan just had a long conversation about this very topic -- they were trying to explain to Ben what tinsel was and then they realized that no one uses tinsel anymore. But why? What happened to tinsel? Was it found, like everything else in the world, to be a choking hazard to children under three (not to make light of choking hazards to children)?

6) Tree Maintenance

Big question: Do you water the tree regularly after sticking it in it's nearly-impossible to maneuver tree stand? And if so, how often? And how much? Brendan didn't seem to have any clue about this issue, but Ben kept telling Laura to water it, so water the tree she did every few days, filling up a glass and crawling around under the tree to make sure the water made it into the tree stand and not all over the expensive sisel rug. Which leads to another thread -- which is, how do you water the tree without getting a shitload of fucking (463) pine needles in your hair? Laura could not figure out how this was supposed to work -- crawling around, not spilling the water, providing ample water without overwatering the tree so that the water wouldn't overflow from the tree stand and ruin the sisel rug, all without getting half the tree in her hair -- but whatever the correct process and procedure is, she obviously didn't know about it because by about a week before Christmas the beautiful perfect tree that had been so healthy and happy looking suddenly just drooped and sagged and, for lack of a better way to describe it, gave up. Trying to water it at this point doesn't do any good, as Laura found out -- frantically crawling around some more and not caring any longer about the stupid water on the rug -- but it was too late. The tree was gone. Which led Ben to plead that next year "they" get better about watering the tree. No problem, Ben -- as soon as Mommy finds a "Christmas for Non-Jews" Continuing Ed Class somewhere...

7) Number of Gifts

Extremely confusing. Overwhelmingly confusing. How many fucking presents are you supposed to get people? Two? Three? Twenty? Fifty? And what about the stockings? Couldn't you go broke filling those stockings up with tons of shit? And if you do stuff those stockings with tons of shit, are you supposed to wrap that shit? Or does the shit in the stocking just get shoved in there without being wrapped? More about wrapping later, but truly, this nebulousness and open-endedness about quantity is really a big huge bummer. Seriously. Laura would like someone someday to tell her how many presents to buy because the whole question is just impossible to solve.

8) Santa and the Issue of Lying

One of the most basic of issues for people in general and Jews in particular: what the hell do you do about this Santa business? Clearly you lie, okay, Laura gets that. But for how long? And with how much intensity? With a kind of ironic-wink? Or as if your life depended on it? And if you go ahead with the lying, when do you stop? When your kid asks you directly, point-blank, when they're over 5, if Santa exists? Or do you wait until their friends make fun of them for being a gullible dork for believing in Santa when they're 10 or 11 or 20? I mean, Laura's all for the happy lies that make people happy -- in fact, she's all for lots of different kinds of minor harmless lies -- it's just that she's not sure about procedure and process here.

9) Santa and The Issue of Credit

Admittedly, this feels like a very Jewish question to Laura: if you lie successfully to your kid(s) about Santa bringing all the presents, doesn't that mean that you don't get any credit for all the shopping and shlepping and wrapping and paying you've done? This doesn't seem at all fair! I mean, it just feels wrong to Laura! Unless, as she said at the beginning of this category, this is a Jewish thing -- being unwilling to give up the narcissistic element of credit for all the fabulous gifts being opened. In which case, what is it about non-Jews that they don't mind giving up the credit? Doesn't it bother them? Or is that what is meant by the Christian "Spirit of Christmas" business Laura has always heard so much about?

10) Santa and the Issue of Wrapping

A minor strand of this multi-part Santa question, but Laura was flummoxed by the problems she was having with Ben regarding the wrapping of presents. You see, Laura had always assumed that you wrap presents and put them under the tree as you go -- that is, you buy some presents, wrap them, stick them under the tree, watch as your child gets more and more excited about all the stuff accumulating there, and repeat -- but apparently, this is all wrong! Who knew!! Apparently, and Laura clearly didn't get the memo on this, you're supposed to buy the presents, hide them all, then wrap them ALL on Christmas Eve after your kid(s) have gone to bed, thereby preserving the myth (lie) that Santa came and brought and did and wrapped and masterminded and gave and bestowed and shared and provided everything and that you had nothing to do with it. Ohhhhhhhhhhhh. So THAT'S what you do.

11) Christmas Eve Feast or No Feast

Laura just assumed that everyone has a Who-Ville type feast on Christmas Eve too, not just on Christmas Day, but apparently, yet again, she's wrong. Sorry for being so Jewish!! Laura never got the memo on this one either since Brendan says that every family has different traditions and that in his family there was no big feast on Christmas Eve. Laura's not sure if he's telling the truth or if he's just making it up so he gets out of having to cook on Christmas Eve, but she figures this is just another one of those non-Jewish mysteries she'll never fully understand. Maybe it's because Jews a) always feast b) always feast the night BEFORE a holiday as well as on the holiday itself. Or maybe it's because most Christmas movies she's watched always have a big cozy Christmas Eve dinner. Even more confusing is what you're supposed to make for the Christmas feast: Roast Beast, like the Grinch carves, or Christmas Goose? Or Ham? Or Turkey? Or Tofurky? Whatever. Laura just sucked down her Campbell's Creamy Tomato Soup at Hand during last night's feast-less Christmas Even and kept her mouth shut.

12) Church

This one feels ridiculous for Laura to even mention since obviously Christmas has nothing to do with going to church! But still -- Laura's confused: Are you supposed to go to church on or during Christmas or is going to church on or during Christmas just for losers? Laura asks this at the risk of her question sounding disrespectful -- that's absolutely not her intention -- because she emailed a non-Jewish friend recently about finding a midnight mass service to take Ben to and the friend couldn't believe Laura was asking her that: Church? she said. Midnight mass? she said. Me???? Obviously Laura had asked the wrong non-Jew. Sorrrrrrrrrry!!!! But still, she's unclear about who goes and who doesn't and when you go if you do go.

Laura thinks she's gotten all her questions in here -- and she's seriously hoping that people leave lots of clarifying and elucidating and illuminating and confusion-ending comments so that next Christmas will be a lot easier for her. In the meantime, she wants to wish everyone who's not Jewish who's reading this a Merry Christmas and everyone who's Jewish who's reading this Vague and Non-Religious Holiday Greetings. Assuming, of course, that's what you're supposed to do on Christmas...

Merry Christmas Eve From Santa Boy

2008-12-24T20:49:00.003-05:00

Hugh Jackman Decoy Photo #4

2008-12-23T12:33:00.003-05:00

Just in case anyone's wondering, Laura's received more than a few "concerned" emails from friends wondering if they should be worried about, as one person put it, her "escalating Hugh Jackman obsession." She appreciates the concern but Laura thinks not. Yes she's obsessed with using photos of Hugh Jackman in her brants and yes, that constant contact with photos of Hugh Jackman has made her slightly obsessed with him -- life is so circular, isn't it?!? -- but at the end of the day her Hugh Jackman stunt is really just about one thing:

Brant traffic.

For over two years Laura has branted about....well...nothing. Not exactly nothing, but nothing that she could actually point to and say, "I brant about ___." For awhile, after her surgery, she wrote her "Breast Brants." But at a certain point she ran out of things to say about her experience with breast cancer. And she never found another subject that she could focus her thoughts on and channel her feelings through. And, most importantly, a subject that would attract and keep readers.

Until the other day when she posted that first photo of Hugh Jackman.

It was like a light went on -- people were actually reading her brant because of the teaser photo on Facebook. Ever the amateur social scientist, she posted another! And another! And not only were her readers appreciative, but Laura herself was appreciative: because she realized Hugh Jackman could inspire her branting.

It's kind of like the blogger whose name was Julia or Julie and who wrote a blog -- and later a book (or maybe it was just a book) -- about cooking all of Julia Child's recipes and what that was like for her and what it meant to her -- "Julia and Julie" or something like that -- and about the woman who just wrote a blog (and now a book) about following Oprah's advice for a full year and what it was like for her and what it meant to her. It's using a famous person, a public person, as a jumping off point for self-exploration and self-revelation. Well, why can't Laura do the same thing with Hugh? Why can't she glom onto his visage and use it to both attract readers and give her brants a focus and a framework?

For example, let's take today's photo. Here's a shot of HJ from "Someone Like You." Which is really convenient since Laura can now launch into her story about coming to the set while the movie was being shot and describe what it was like to see HJ, wearing that exact shirt, sitting on that exact couch, filming the exact scene in the photo. Is this not a really convenient way of killing several birds with one photo of Hugh Jackman?

Put another way: For Proust, it was madelaines. For Laura, it is photos of Hugh Jackman. For now, anyway...

August, 2000. Laura had just given birth to Ben, who was 10 pounds 2 ounces, and adjusting to life as a new mother down in hot humid frizzy-hair-weather Washington DC. Right before she'd gone into the hospital to have Ben, filming -- or, as they say in the movie business, "the commencement of principle photography" -- had begun for Animal Husbandry -- which is what it was still called at that point -- and the timing couldn't have been better since anyone who knows anything about terms like the commencement of principle photography knows that the commencement of principle photography means that you get a nice big check.

Anyway, back from the hospital with this giant new baby, Laura received new-baby gifts and cards -- and even a small stuffed cow with a cow bell attached from the film's producer, Lynda Obst (Sleepless in Seattle) (Anyone who knows anything about the movie business knows that every time you mention the name of someone in the movie business you have to put, in parentheses, the 'projects' they've worked on -- the financially successful projects they've worked on, that is, which is why you might have noticed that Laura didn't put "Someone Like You" in the parentheses following Lynda Obst's name.) (But more about that later.) This adorable little stuffed cow even had a big tag attached to it with a whole bunch of signatures -- autographs and good wishes from the cast and crew -- which couldn't have been sweeter -- and before long her film agent and Lynda Obst herself had called a few times to invite Laura and her husband to come and visit the set.

Under normal circumstances, Laura would have jumped at the opportunity to visit the set -- or, as anyone who knows anything about the movie business knows, you don't say "visit the set" -- you say "go on set" -- but there was one small problem: while Laura had had her baby, she had not yet lost her baby weight.

Now, as anyone who knows anything about anything knows, not losing your baby weight is one of the biggest sources of shame and humiliation for women. There is just no way apparently to excuse the fact that not only did you not have enough self control during your pregnancy to stop yourself from gaining weight but you still don't have any self-control -- let alone self-respect! -- to starve yourself and lose the weight already! Laura had gained 50 pounds during her pregnancy and was still carrying around at least 25 of them when Hollywood literally started calling, which is why she ignored the calls.

Finally, though, she finally realized that they really should go on set of the movie, un-lost baby weight or no un-lost baby weight, so plans were made to do just that. It was early August and Laura's stepdaughter Sarah just happened to be visiting from Denver, and they decided that they would combine a trip to NYC with their annual trip to the Dutchess County Fair in Rhinebeck, New York, that Sarah loved going to every summer. So they packed up the car -- packed the diapers and the wipes and the car seats and the onesies, packed the formula and the nipples and the sterilizing pot and the bibs, and set out from DC to New York for their triangulated journey.

They hit the road in late morning -- Brendan was driving, and Laura was in the passenger seat. In the back seat was Ben in his carseat, and Sarah, who was 8 at the time, and Brendan's mother Jane, who was and always has been half of Laura's body weight. (Don't get her started on this particular detail.) Sarah was really into Harry Potter, so there was a Books On Tape version of the first book playing in the tape player from the Beltway all the way up the New Jersey Turnpike. At about the four hour mark they hit traffic and it started to rain -- which, as all married people who are on a road trip know, means a complete adult meltdown is imminent -- which was bad timing since they were barreling through the Holland Tunnel and about to come out the other side in search of an address in Tribeca where the shooting was taking place.

The problem was, neither Brendan nor Laura knew anything about Tribeca despite the fact that between the two of them they'd clocked almost 25 years of living in New York -- but Laura had lived in the West Village and the East Village, and Brendan had lived on the Upper West Side and Brooklyn. Within minutes they were lost in Chinatown, getting stuck behind trucks and bike messengers and having no idea where the fuck (460) they were and where the fuck (461) they were going. Needless to say, within seconds, they were fighting.

But this was not just a normal fight about getting lost -- this was something else entirely, a fight about getting lost that was on some kind of epic scale Laura had never even known existed. Because after driving around in circles for about 15 minutes, Brendan suddenly accused Laura of withholding directions -- something Laura still thinks is one of the most hilarious things she's ever heard (which is why she's putting it in bold italics) -- meaning that he thought she knew where they were supposed to be going but was refusing to tell him where they were going because she preferred to be trapped in a car with three generations of family screaming at each other as they went around and around and around lower Manhattan in the rain!

Now it's worth pointing out, despite how old it makes Laura look, that this was long before iPhones and Blackberrys and GPS Navigational systems were built into the dashboard of cars -- I know! How thoroughly unimaginable this must be to Laura's youthful readers!! No, this was still a low-tech era, which meant that if you were late and couldn't find your way to an appointment there was no way to let the people who were waiting for you know that you were late and couldn't find your way to the appointment. Finally, though, after much yelling and regressing (Brendan's mother actually had to tell them to cut it out) they found their way, got to the address, and parked the car, Laura having to change Ben's diaper on a diaper-changing pad on the ground in the corner of the parking lot, before they went into the old building where the filming was taking place.

It was one of those huge old industrial kind of loft-buildings with clanging elevators and huge steep stairwells that Laura remembers because it was hard for her to climb those huge stairs since she was carrying all that extra weight -- luckily Brendan was carrying Ben, then about 5 weeks old, in the car seat -- and so in they all walked: Jane, Sarah, Brendan with Ben in the car seat, and Laura and her extra 25 lbs of still-unlost-baby weight. There were signs up on the walls and on the doors -- Animal Husbandry, those signs said -- and Laura has to admit it was pretty cool. At some point some official movie-person found them and brought them over to Lynda Obst, who couldn't have been more welcoming and helpful, even taking Sarah by the hand to get her a smoothie from one of the many amply supplied food tables located at various spots throughout the building.

This left Laura with the movie person, with Brendan close by standing guard over the car seat. Laura remembers this part clearly because it's here that her giant faux pas occurs: she looks up and sees this amazing looking man in the distance, but her view is partially blocked by something else -- someone, a man, with his hand outstretched in greeting and a friendly smile on his face -- Greg Kinnear, it turned out to be, who Laura inadvertently walks right past because her sights are focused completely on the vision in the distance -- Hugh Jackman.

Now it's important to note that back in the summer of 2000, Hugh Jackman was not very well known yet -- in fact, when her agent called to tell her that he'd been cast in the role of Eddie, the inveterate womanizer, they were kind of confused: XMen had literally just been released in early July and Swordfish wouldn't be released until 2001, sometime after Animal Husbandry was due to be released. So when he walked toward her and Brendan and crouched down to look at Ben in his car seat and told them that he and his wife had recently adopted a little boy they'd named Oscar, who was just about the same age as Ben, well, to say she swooned would be an understatement. Eventually, Laura realized her faux pas and talked with Greg Kinnear, who was also incredibly friendly and normal and not at all celebrity-like, by which point Lynda Obst returned with Sarah and the Smoothie and introduced Laura to Ashley Judd who, well, was, you know, really really really thing and very very very shy* (*unfriendly).

Laura's going to wrap up this story now -- it's embarrassingly long and she hopes she hasn't worn out her welcome with the Hugh Jackman business -- but to pull it all together she's going to say that soon after all the meeting and greeting and gabbing and shmoozing, they actually started shooting a scene -- the scene where "Eddie" and "Jane" are in a "meeting" (they're co-workers) and "Jane" notices a hickey on "Eddie's" neck. And here's the nice circular part of the story -- the line that Hugh Jackman said in this scene -- "I bit myself shaving" -- is probably one of the only lines in the whole movie that was just as Laura had written it. Which was really cool: not only did Laura get to see the set and meet the cast, despite feeling like a giant cow herself, but she also got to see them shooting a scene which contained a line of dialogue that she'd actually written.

Look Closely and You'll See Hugh Jackman in the Picture

2008-12-21T13:29:00.005-05:00

For all of you waiting for today's daily Hugh Jackman Decoy Photo, this is kind of just a place-keeper: a photo that might not be a full size photo of Hugh Jackman but one that contains a small-ish photo of Hugh Jackman which, let's be frank, is what Laura's brant is now all about.

But more about that later.

Laura took this picture with her phone a week or two ago. She and Ben were in the local supermarket -- Shaw's, or Star (it's confusing since they keep changing their name from Star to Shaw's to Star again, not that it matters) -- in the cereal aisle, and they were negotiating the trip's cereal purchase. Ben had asked for a box of Cap'n Crunch -- it's one of the few sweet things he likes -- he doesn't drink juice, doesn't like chocolate, does eat any candy -- what a freak! -- so Laura's willing on occasion to drop $5 on a box of crud. But before they could grab a box of whatever they were going to grab, Ben's eyes got huge and he pointed to the Raisin Bran Crunch. Thinking he was going to try to sell her on a box of that high-fiber-low-fructose-or-glucose shit -- you know, because she's old and needs "healthy cereal" -- she shook her head no.

Ignoring her, he walked to the shelf, picked up a box and turned to her: "Mom," he said in a stage whisper. "It's your movie!!!"

And so it was. Standing there, on a Sunday, in the middle of a cereal aisle in a suburban supermarket, Laura was confronted with the fact that not only had the movie based on her first novel kind of tanked at the box office and gone almost straight to DVD -- not that she's complaining! people have worse problems then feeling like the movies based on their books weren't that great! -- but that DVD was now on the back of cereal box as part of some "free" movie offer. As she often does when it comes to matters of her career, she had mixed feelings: on the one hand, as Walter Winchell once said, or inspired people to say, there's no such thing as bad publicity, and so she felt she should be grateful for the "plug" -- no matter where that "plug" appeared and how lame that plug was. On the other hand, she couldn't help feeling like she was on Candid Camera: Was she being tested? Was she being "punked"? Or "pranked"? Should she get "tanked"? She had no idea. All she knew was that the DVD ad totally made her day: it was hilarious and she knew, if nothing else, it would make for an entertaining brant post...

You know, a brant post that she's posting before she posts the real brant with the next full-size photo of Hugh Jackman...

Hugh Jackman "Jazz Hands" Decoy Photo #3

2008-12-21T01:16:00.007-05:00

OK, look. It's late. Laura's exhausted from being cooped up all day in the house during a blizzard with a kid recovering from corrective surgery. And gratuitously posting another photo of Hugh Jackman -- this one, of him dancing -- was just too easy. I mean, why spend hours trying to think of a suitable brant topic when all you need to do is search Google images, spend 2 hours deciding which of the many perfect photos of Hugh Jackman is going to grace your brant today, and post? Insta-Brant! Today's photo-selection-process was actually a little more labor intensive than the last two -- most of the photos of HJ that Laura found were of HJ in the Australian ocean or on the Australian beach (i.e. shirtless) or while wearing a hat of some sort while in Australia. And for reasons she both can't explain and doesn't feel the need to explain, she just wasn't in the mood for a shirtless or hat-wearing Hugh. (Maybe tomorrow.) And so she settled on this one -- mainly because of the pose:

For those of you who don't know this little bit of trivia, Laura is a sucker for Jazz-Hands.

Laura's tempted to push herself at this late hour to produce a full-length brant, but quite frankly she's just too tired to start blabbing away about nothing. Plus, she's getting her 43rd hot flash of the day and has to get the fucking (459) laptop off her lap before she jumps out the window and into the snow below for some fucking (460) relief. So she's going to sign off now with the promise of another Hugh Jackman Decoy Photo Post tomorrow....

Hugh Jackman Decoy-Update Continued

2008-12-19T10:17:00.028-05:00

Laura had so much fun branting last night after her long unintentional life-interruptus hiatus that she's going to keep going. First of all, she wants to thank the people who let her know that the photo of Hugh Jackman was what reeled them in and led them to, as more than one Facebook friend has said, "click through." This is one of those admissions that is kind of dicey: just like the old "Wow! Did you lose a ton of weight?!?" this one points out the fact that the promise of fabulously hilarious or interesting prose wasn't the big draw, but the photo of an unbearably gorgeous man was. But you know what? Laura doesn't really give a shit. She's just glad her cheap trick worked. Which is why she's posting another photo of Hugh Jackman here. She figures, it worked once, why not post photos of Hugh Jackman in every brant?! Only today's photo is just a shameless attempt at hooking readers. Check back soon for more photos of HJ along with relevant information about him and the time (2 times, actually! once while he was shooting Animal Husbandry, which is what it was called when she visited the set, and once on the red carpet for the premiere of Someone Like You, which is what it was called when it was released) Laura met him and recent hilarious sightings of the long-since discontinued DVD of the movie (hint: think cereal boxes in the supermarket).

While Laura's assistant (ha ha, or, as the young people say, "LOL") scours the Internet for another fab-foto of HJ, she's going to continue on in her update...

9) As some of her more careful readers might have noticed, Laura made a passing reference to Ben having surgery yesterday. Due to her [previously branted-about] issues with "transparency" as it pertains to her branting, she's not going to divulge what kind of surgery he had -- she doesn't want to be one of those people who uses her kid's life as fodder, no matter how desperate she is for fodder (and believe me, she's kind of desperate) -- so all she'll say is that he had some "corrective" surgery. The surgery took place at Children's Hospital in Boston, down in the Bermuda Triangle of amazing medical facilities -- Children's Hospital, the Brigham and Women's Hospital, the Dana Farber Cancer Center -- she thinks there's even a few more of them -- and it's when you have to be in a hospital or have some kind of diagnostic test done that you really feel glad that you live near these places. Ben's surgery was scheduled for noon, so, just like an airport arrival, they were told to show up 90 minutes early for processing. Once the minimal paperwork was completed, and once she'd chased Ben down and pulled him out from under one of the waiting room chairs -- and after she promised that he could, after his surgery, open up one of his Hanukkah-slash-Christmas presents early (a used Gamecube with all the trimmings off of eBay for a steal!) -- they were led into the pre-op area. As anyone who's ever had surgery knows, this is the area where about 10-12 beds-on-wheels are parked in various bays with close-able curtains. You set up shop in one -- change, get in the bed, and wait to be visited by about 22 different medical personnel: doctors, nurses, interns, residents, anesthesiologists, OR nurses, orderlies, etc. And since it's Boston, just as Laura reported in her "Breast Brants" about her own surgery, all these hospitals are "teaching hospitals" which means you can basically double that number of people who are going to stop in with a clipboard and ask you twenty questions about which side your surgery is going to be on.

Not that Laura's complaining! She loves how amazingly organized and prepared and smart and helpful and professional all the people who stopped by were -- how sweet they were to Ben and how nice they were to her, knowing how difficult it is to know your little guy is going to be put out for a few hours and cut open, no matter how correctively (as opposed to more seriously). So you can imagine her surprise when one of the medical professionals who stopped by was a woman in a white coat offering up a selection of video games. Yes, video games. Gameboys, Nintendo DSs, and a variety of tiny game cartridges to pick from. You should have seen Ben's face when they handed him a Nintendo and told him he could play all the way to the operating room. At first Laura was like, Hey? What about ME? Where's MY Portable Electronic Distraction Device? But then she didn't care, so thrilled was she to see that Ben was completely and utterly immersed in his game. In fact, he was so immersed that no matter what anybody came by to do -- take his temperature, check his blood pressure, adjust his finger-oxygen-monitor -- he barely looked up. All he did was stare at the Nintendo and move slightly to accommodate whatever pokers and prodders were poking and prodding.

They let Laura go with Ben into the OR -- they put a blue scrub-style robe in her and a little poufy hat and a mask -- and down the hall they went, Laura following Geisha-like behind the bed-on-wheels and the group of nurses and doctors -- until they came to the OR itself. Laura, ever the concerned parent, was a little nervous at how bright and unflattering and harsh the glaring giant overhead lights were -- in her haste to get to the hospital on time, she'd forgotten to put on any make-up or do anything with her hair besides put it up in one of those clippy-things -- but then she realized her entire body was covered in scrub-ware so it wasn't really an issue. Actually, she's kidding about worrying about how she looked -- she couldn't have cared less, which is a whole other problem and brant -- all she cared about was Ben on the table, with the little mask over his face breathing in the sleeping gas they were pumping in.

Anyway, all went well and Ben's home recovering, playing endlessly with the Gamecube and being a really good sport about the fact that it really hurts to stand, sit, move, get up, walk, sleep, etc. and will for the next few days and possibly even the next few weeks.

One last [semi] interesting tidbit to add to the surgery story is that Children's Hospital is the same hospital that Laura had her emergency ruptured appendectomy (this is like Starbucks -- do you say emergency ruptured appendectomy or ruptured emergency appendectomy or grande ruptured 2% emergency chai appendectomy?) way back in 1967. As she mentioned recently, that emergency surgery took place at the height of Boston's Blizzard of '67 when she was four (yes, ok, all you geniuses can do the math and figure out Laura's age now --29 ["LOL"]). Just another weird by-product of moving back to where you grew up the way Laura did.

10) Last week, Laura went to a party -- the annual Holiday party thrown by Q Division, a Somerville-based recording studio co-owned by the brilliant Mike Denneen. Mike Denneen, besides being the husband of the amazing Jen Trynin (more on her later -- sheesh! it's exhausting to have all these talented friends to work into brants!), is one of the best music producers in the business, with a list of artists that includes Aimee Mann, Fountains of Wayne, Letters to Cleo, and The Click 5. Before Laura tells you the weather-related part of this story -- which, come to think of it, really isn't so interesting so she'll just say it now -- big surprise: it was fucking (458) POURING the night of the party which totally sucked, though it was fun to go to the party and spend some time with a new friend, Simone Beck, lead singer for a local band called "Sugar Snow" [more on her, too!]) -- she'll go back in time and tell you the Mike Denneen-Jen Trynin story.

Back in 2003 or thereabouts, the then-owner of Newtonville Books, Tim Huggins, asked if Laura would do him a favor: meet with a friend of his who was writing a book about her short-lived but stellar career as a musician. Laura, frequently asked to do such favors, and a big believer, when she has time, in, if you'll pardon the goofy expression, "paying it forward," agreed. Most of the time these kinds of meetings are awkward because at the end of the coffee date the manuscript she gets handed usually isn't very good and then she has to figure out a way to help the person understand that getting an agent might be really really hard if not sort of impossible.

But this time was different. Laura met Jen at the Starbucks in Newton Centre and Jen, ever the super-cool musician, walked in wearing a pair of fabulous Gucci sunglasses. They were even more fabulous because Jen referred to them as throwbacks to the time when she had money -- something Laura often says about her own 10-year-old cashmere pea-coat or giant 6-ply tomato-red pashmina or diamond-drop earrings -- and instantly she had a crush on Jen who was hilarious and brilliant and funny and, she should mention, about 8 months pregnant. They traded stories about their careers, made jokes about the relativity of success and failure, compared Hebrew School and Jewish-Parent stories, and then parted ways with the promise of another coffee date. When Laura got home she tore open the manilla envelope and started reading Jen's pages which were unbelievably good and for once she knew that her help was completely unnecessary -- she gave Jen the names of a few excellent agents and within a matter of weeks she signed on with one and got her manuscript in shape to submit to publishers -- Everything I'm Cracked Up To Be, which was eventually published to fantastic reviews.
She also listened to Jen's two CDs, Gun Shy Trigger Happy and Cockamamie and got addicted to them immediately: Jen, she decided very quickly, was a genius.
A few months later, Jen was so grateful for the "help" Laura had given her, despite the fact that she hadn't really helped her that much -- that she offered to help Laura out in return in any way possible. Laura couldn't think of any help she needed that she wasn't already getting and paying hourly for, but when Jen offered that her husband could help her wire her Victorian house for wireless computing -- something Laura barely even knew existed at the time! -- she of course agreed. And so Jen and Mike showed up, and Mike proceeded to crawl around on his hands and knees on the third floorof Laura's old house, hooking up wires and cords and other things that looked electronic. Several trips to Radio Shack later and several hours on her lemon of an iMac, and she was networked and ready for a a wirelessly connected laptop (again, this was big news back then). Laura was, of course, incredibly grateful for his help, but didn't think much more about Mike Denneen until a few months later when, at a book gathering, someone pointed him out and said to Laura, in hushed reverent tones, "Look, that's Mike Denneen." She nodded and told the person that Mike was a really nice guy who was great at putting computer stuff together. Which is when the person looked at her like she was a fucking (459) nut job. Putting together computer stuff? the person said before filling Laura in on his "day job." Despite the fact that this happened years ago, every time Laura sees Mike, like last week at his cool party, she can't help but remember her idiocy.

p.s. About the photo of HJ -- Laura has no idea exactly when it was taken or whom exactly to credit -- she apologizes in advance to her two extremely talented professional photographer friends, Miranda Penn Turin and Karen Pike, both from Newton and both to be mentioned in more detail later--but she's going to go ahead and post it anyway because, I mean, seriously, when was the last time you saw a picture like that? Besides, without it, all potential copyright infringement issues notwithstanding, you wouldn't be reading her brant right now....

Laura Impersonates a Carnie and Other Tales of the Recent Past

2008-12-18T21:40:00.018-05:00

Wow. It's kind of been a while. Laura would spend a paragraph or two pondering how almost a month could have gone by without her branting when she specifically started this new brant so she could start branting more regularly, but that would just be too boring. Instead, she's going to post one of those nugget-ized updates -- a smorgasbord of vignettes, if you will -- that will provide something for everyone, especially those with short attention spans or very little time to stay and read. Strap in, though, because she's really going to be changing topics pretty quickly and without much warning.

1) Since branting in November, People magazine named its choice for Sexiest Man of the Year -- Hugh Jackman, who, for those of you who have watched Someone Like Yo u on cable all these years will agree, absolutely deserves the honor. I mean, would you just look at him?? (Feel free to take a minute now to indulge in the sidebar of Laura's brant to watch a clip of Hugh from the movie, and check back to hear about the time Laura actually met Hugh Jackman in person and how incredibly nice he was.) Laura feels really badly that the new movie he's in, Australia, seems to have taken a beating review-wise and earnings-wise, but she is heartened to learn that Hugh Jackman h as just been chosen to host this year's Academy Awards ceremony. The guy can sing, dance, and make self-deprecating jokes, all while looking impossibly stylish and behaving with genuine grace. Laura doesn't know about the rest of you, but she's planning on watching this year -- that is, actually watching, not just flipping channels back and forth to see who's winning.

2) In a fit of holiday shopping, Laura went to the Burlington Mall in suburban Boston. And in a fit of idiocy during that fit of holiday shopping, Laura saw a skirt she liked -- a black sequined mini skirt -- and decided to try it on. The store she saw it in was one of those new semi-cheesy semi-slutty vaguely low-budget-but-stylish chain stores -- she thinks it's called Jacob, or something like that -- and like many stores these days, semi-cheesy and semi-slutty or otherwise, it was nearly empty. So Laura, forgetting she's about 10 years older and 10 pounds heavier (okay, maybe 15) than she was back in the day when she used to wear mini skirts, grabbed a skirt and went into the dressing room. The good news is that the skirt fit and actually zipped. The bad news is that Laura realized she is simply too old to walk around in a black sequined mini skirt. And that she has nowhere to wear it. And that even if she weren't too old to wear it and actually had somewhere to wear it to, it seemed like it was one of those skirts she would tear the first time she sat down in it. Needless to say, she didn't buy the skirt.

3) In the dressing room of the cheesy slutty low-budget fashion store, Laura noticed a sign on the mirror: "Due to sanitary concerns, customers must wear undergarments when trying on clothes." Which led her to wonder: Are so many people trying on clothes these days without underwear that a directive actually has to be articulated?

4) Though she hasn't counted, Laura thinks she's said the eff word about 450 times during the past week. This is mainly due to dealing with all the fucking (451) Boston drivers who cut her off and then have the nerve to give her the finger and all the fucking (452) pedestrians who hurl themselves into traffic in order to cross the street. Not that she wants to get off on a tangent here, and not that she hasn't jaywalked herself a time or two herself, but one of her (many) pet peeves are those designated crosswalks at which motorists are obligated, by law, to stop if there is a person standing in one. Laura's pet peeve is not that pedestrians shouldn't have a safe place to cross but that they should WAIT before crossing to give the motorist a chance to fucking (453) stop their car safely! But nooooooooo. That just doesn't happen here. People get to a designated crosswalk and without looking -- seriously, without looking -- leap off the sidewalk and start crossing because they purportedly have the right of way. Sometimes these people even lead with a fucking (454) baby stroller as they indulge themselves in their right to cross! But don't get Laura started on this topic because she'll never stop.

5) During Laura's fit of shopping this week, she also went to Kohl's for the first time ever. (I know -- this is going to be a big year for cheeseball gifts.) For a few heady seconds she wondered if Kohl's was the new Target but after staring into the abyss of holiday merchandise and seeing the sprawl of racks and racks of depressing women's apparel, she decided that while Kohl's certainly has it's appeal, it's no Target.

6) Laura's been so caught up in Christmas holiday related occurrences that she almost forgot to mention the amazing Thanksgiving dinner she cooked all by herself! She feels justified in saying it was amazing because her brother-in-law Patrick, Brendan's brother, said that her stuffing -- (smoky bacon cornbread stuffing, adapted from about three different cornbread stuffing recipes) -- was the best stuffing he'd ever had. Laura doesn't expect you to understand the magnitude of this compliment because there's no way you could possibly know how high the bar is for Brendan and his brothers when it comes to food -- not fussy "gourmet" food, but regular food. There are many family tales about one of Brendan's brothers offering "honest" assessments of various pies and cakes and meals produced by mothers or wives, so to say that Laura was a little nervous during the preparations of the Big Event would be kind of an understatement. What's slightly disturbing, however, is just how important this compliment was to Laura -- at the risk of setting off an impromptu discussion of her Cooking Phobia (refer to earlier brants about this topic on her original website-brant for more on this scintillating topic), suffice it to say that due to her food preparation-based insecurities, she honestly felt that this compliment was on par with getting her books published. Sad but true.

7) Not to bury the lede (and for those of you who didn't minor in journalism like a loser in college [the way Laura did], that's spelled correctly) but now it's time to explain the "carnie impersonation" incident. During this aforementioned shopping trip, Laura went into Linens N' Things which is mercifully (no offense to all the employees losing their jobs) going out of business. She says "mercifully" because she's just never liked that store because something about it was just inexplicably depressing. But anyway, Laura couldn't resist the pull of the giant "Going Out Of Business/Everything Must Go" signs and pulled into the parking lot. If Laura thought the fully stocked store was depressing, this was a depressing-fest! Almost completely empty, with signs informing customers that "fixtures and display shelves" were also available for purchase, the merchandise that was left was moved toward the center of the store, away from the purchase-able display shelves. But there was something strange about the merchandise: It wasn't that cheap! Laura sort of thought, Oh! Going out of business! Everything must go! That must mean that things would be really really cheap! But every time she stopped to look at an overwrought iPod clock radio/charger/alarm/player/air freshener or a hot-chocolate whipper or a set of almost 100% cotton sheets, nothing was actually cheap enough to trigger that elusive impulsive urge to buy stupid idiotic cheaply made household goods. As she was leaving the store however, she noticed a display of Funnel Cake Kits and couldn't believe her luck: Ben loves Funnel Cakes and has said many times that he wishes there was a way to make them at home.

Now, for those of you unfamiliar with Funnel Cakes, Laura will tell you that here in the Northeast this type of fried dough is called "Fried Dough." Or, if you're in, say, New York City, at one of those Little Italy festivals, it's called Zeppoli. In New Orleans, where Laura went once back in the mid-1990s to help Anne Rice with a week's worth of book promotion, they're called Beignets. Anyway, whenever Ben goes anywhere where fried dough is available -- namely, at fairs like the Dutchess County Fair in Rhinebeck, NY where he goes almost every year with his cousins -- or at the annual "Clam Fest" in Yarmouth, Maine -- carnivals, essentially, manned by "carnies" -- he always gets a giant slab of fried dough, covered in a blanket of powered sugar. Unfortunately for Laura, he usually eats it so fast that she barely gets a bite, which is a drag, since one of Laura's favorite foods in the whole wide world, she's embarrassed to admit, is fried dough.

So there she was, at the depressing final clearance sale of the depressing Linens 'N Things, staring at this display of Funnel Cake-making kits which, at 50% off, were a very do-able $7. Not sure if she could actually successfully make these funnel cakes -- despite coming off the heady success of her Thanksgiving stuffing -- she decided to take a chance and get a kit. And because Ben was going to have surgery the next day, she offered to make it for him last night. All she's going to say is that in order to make fried dough or funnel cakes or whatever the fuck (455) you want to call them, you have to heat cooking oil to a temperature of 350 degrees which means you have to hold a cooking thermometer in the oil to see how hot it's getting. This is hard to do because, well, the pan and the oil and the metal heat-conducting thermometer are fucking (456) hot! Laura thinks that in addition to the tongs and the mix and the pitcher and the powdered sugar shaker the stupid little kit should also come with a fucking (457) fire-suit to protect you in case the oil you're heating up starts a grease fire, but that's probably too much to expect for $7. Grease-fire-phobia aside, Laura persevered, heating her oil up to 350 degrees and then pouring the funnel cake batter into the hot oil, watching in amazement as the dough puffed up and sizzled and became a gorgeous light brown deep-fried color. It's frightening to think of how much grease was in the two funnel cakes she made, but at that point, to be perfectly frank. Laura didn't really care: she was just glad to be alive.

8) Oh, and before she forgets, Laura has a confession to make: she bought one of those "ornament organizers" from The Container Store. The green one with the red flaps on top. And she highly recommends it.

...to be continued....

What a Dork

2008-11-20T16:23:00.007-05:00

Laura had set the afternoon and evening aside today to work on her screenplay -- Ben, having been diagnosed with pneumonia and well into his course of antibiotics, had gone back to school today (albeit for the weekly half-day) and then he and Brendan went to the School of Rock for his drum lesson and Beatles rehearsal -- but a few minutes ago she did something so dorky and idiotic that she can't get anything done.

At the risk of providing TMI, Laura had some kind of -- she won't go so far as to call it an infection -- kidney "issue" or "situation." She'd gone to see a new doctor on Monday -- one she hadn't seen before and one with whom she has a longer get-to-know-you-new-patient appointment scheduled in a few weeks -- and he seemed great. She described her symptoms, he prescribed an antibiotic, and now, a few days later, while most of her original symptoms were, as medical professionals say, "resolved," she still felt a really uncomfortable tenderness in her left lower back and weird "discomfort" that seemed to radiate in all sorts of other places too.

Having too much time on her hands -- specifically, and literally, too much time on her hands to sit in her bed with her laptop -- Laura naturally started diagnosing herself for the 20th time that week. And almost instantly she concluded that she must have a kidney stone since her symptoms were semi-similar to one or two on the long list of symptoms she found on various medical sites for kidney stones. A few minutes after this fit of self-diagnosis, the doctor returned her call, and before she could stop herself she explained to the doctor that while her original symptoms were gone, she still had this left lower back thing.

"So I'm thinking that I probably have a kidney stone," she said, laughing a little and mentioning that she'd just diagnosed herself on the Internet.

There was a pause, after which the doctor said, in a tone that wasn't at all unkind or annoyed that here she was, talking to him, a doctor, but instead of him, the doctor, interpreting her symptoms, she was interpreting her symptoms herself, using stupid information from the stupid Internet:

"Let me put it this way: if you had a kidney stone, you'd be on the floor right now. You wouldn't be talking to me."

Laura laughed nervously, and, feeling like an enormous DORK, hurried off the phone. Apparently, according to the actual DOCTOR, the discomfort she was feeling was just part of the normal getting-better-process and would eventually go away. Then she tried to get back to her writing but of course she couldn't -- she was overcome with embarrassment that she'd acted like such a complete idiot with a doctor she barely knew. Even more, she started dreading her December longer-get-to-know-you-new-patient appointment and wonders if she should just do what she usually does when she gets really embarrassed: cancel.

She doesn't really want to do that either -- and not just because it takes about 6 months to see a new doctor, the waiting periods are that long in Massachusetts, if you're even lucky enough to find a doctor who is taking new patients -- but she doesn't know what to do with the black hole of self-loathing and dorkiness she is drowning in right now. Squirming around in her head, trying to think of other things besides her stupid exchange with the doctor, she can't help but remember the words of her first real shrink in New York -- a woman named "Denise" who had a vaguely Eastern European accent and who never minced words (that's a whole other brant -- all those words Denise never minced). Whenever Laura started talking about or thinking about or squirming about something she didn't want to talk about or think about and whenever she tried to change the subject or cancel several appointments in a row because of it, Denise would say:

"You just have to stay in the soup."

The "soup", of course, being the morass of misery and discomfort you experience when you're talking or thinking about difficult things. Or self-inflicted dorky things. And so apparently that's what Laura has to do now: stay in the soup of her extreme dorkitude until it, like the pain from her phantom kidney stones, passes.

Writing About Not Writing

2008-11-18T19:15:00.000-05:00

Laura's been stuck inside with Ben for a full week, since last Tuesday afternoon -- that's when he got a 102 degree fever which has gone up and down but hasn't gone away. The fever, plus a cough, prompted a second visit to the pediatrician today for a chest x-ray to see whether or not it's pneumonia (Laura's waiting for a phone call with the results as she brants). But the weird thing is that despite the fever and the cough, he seems fine. He's happy and he's playing, and he's talking. And talking. And talking.

In fact, he hasn't shut up.

Laura doesn't mean that in a bad way -- in fact, she loves that he talks so much (Laura's husband isn't a big talker so the occasional blab-fest with Ben is a real treat). Despite the fact that he's been stuck inside for a full week -- with Laura, who herself is on antibiotics for a kidney infection -- poor him! -- he's in remarkably good spirits, and she has to admit that there are few things she likes more than sitting around with him, doing MadLibs and watching TV (boy is she lucky that they have the same taste in old Tom and Jerry cartoons and Pink Panther reruns). Obviously, she prefers to sit around with him when he's not all hot and coughing, and when she's not feeling like shit, but he's been delightful company nonetheless.

This news, of course, is not just a boring health-report but something much more important: it's the preamble to an excuse for taking an extended work "break." Laura was going great guns last week on her screenplay adaptation of her last novel, Piece of Work -- the one that was optioned in 2004 and which is the same one that had the option dropped almost exactly two years ago.

(Wait! Look at this! A completely unexpected but perfect example of a failure anniversary right here! And Laura's certain that she can probably come across a failure anniversary in every single brant she writes without even trying to!)

The failure-anniversary of her option being dropped notwithstanding, Laura had been meaning to finally try to write a screenplay -- specifically, to start adapting Piece of Work -- for over a year and a half -- and right when she was going to start last fall, she got the life-saving life-changing life-improving-on-every-level call from matchmaker extraordinaire Patti Novak's "people." It's only been a few weeks since the manuscript for Get Over Yourself! was completely finished -- she and Patti finished writing it on September 1 (exactly on deadline, Laura is proud to point out) but the editing process and the copy-editing process and the legal-vetting process and the correction making process and the waking-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-worried-that-all-the-changes Patti-asked-Laura-to-make-were-actually-made-by-her-and-everyone-else took another two months.

Laura's also trying to get back into branting -- hence the new brant and the spate of semi-regular branting the past week or two -- not just because she wants to get the word out about Get Over Yourself! but also because she really enjoys branting and doesn't see why she can't find a few minutes a few times a week to put down a few of her thoughts. And yet, no matter how easy that sounds -- what's a few minutes a few times a week? -- she finds it almost impossible to sustain regular branting. But Laura's been through enough serious psychotherapy to know that there must be something else besides the issue of time going on here.

Back when Laura started writing (depressed poetry) as a teenager, and then all through high school, and, okay, if she's going to be completely honest, all the way through college and throughout her years in New York, too -- Laura didn't really get happy until well into her thirties, but that's another brant -- people often suggested that she keep a journal. This was way back in the 70s and 80s -- long before "journaling" became a verb and something that everybody did to process their every thought and feeling -- and every year or so Laura would venture out of whatever sad little misery den she was living in at the time and go buy a proper journal (she loved those black Chinese lined journals with the red spines that are really cheap). She'd come back with the journal and about 20 packs of cigarettes and force herself to write an entry. And then she'd force herself to write again the next day -- but usually by the day after that she couldn't bear the idea of writing in her journal and that's when the journal-writing would stop. Eventually she'd put the nearly completely empty journal in a drawer or on a shelf, next to all the other nearly completely empty journals she'd started and never finished, and go about her business until someone yet again suggested she keep a journal.

The reason she kept listening every time someone told her she ought to keep a journal was that the suggestion was always followed by something like, Well, you like to write, don't you? or, That's what writers do -- they write, and implicit in those statements were: If you don't keep a journal you're not a real writer. And back in the old days Laura wanted more than anything to be a real writer. (Now she couldn't care less. But that, too, is another brant.) The only problem was, she didn't actually feel the urge to write everyday. Or every other day. Or even every week or month. In fact, as the years went on, she found that she could go long periods of time without writing and she felt absolutely fine about it.

Years later, when she was working in New York as a book publicist for various divisions of Random House, she'd often have conversations with authors in the backs of cabs or limousines or between the stacks in bookstores before their readings and the authors would often talk about how driven they were to write. Everyday. Everyday they would feel the urge and the need and the desire to express themselves, and Laura soon came to understand that this is what real writers did: they wrote every day.

The problem was, this wasn't what Laura wanted to do. She didn't feel the urge or the need or the desire to express herself every day. In fact, she was lucky if she felt the urge or the need or the desire to write twice a year! Which is basically how she wrote Animal Husbandry -- she'd hole up in her apartment during Christmas when all the publishers would close for a week, and then she'd take her vacation in one lump during the summer, and that's when she'd write. And once the winter holidays were over, and once her summer vacation was over, she'd pack up her pages and put them away. Then she'd go about her business -- business that almost never included writing.

Laura used to think it was laziness and a lack of stick-to-it-iveness that made her unable to keep a journal or write on a regular basis -- but at 46 she's come to a different conclusion: she's decided it has less to do with discipline and more to do with the simple fact that Laura simply doesn't have enough material to write every day.

This of course is the main problem with branting -- thinking of something to write about that is in some way interesting or entertaining or noteworthy to the people reading it. Assuming anyone's even reading it. She knows she's asked this question before in one of her existential-brants-about-branting, but If a branter brants and no one reads it, does it make any sense to keep branting? Similarly, If a branter brants about something completely inane and uninteresting and insignificant, why should anyone read it?

Laura knows that questioning the business of branting is probably just her way of coming up with excuses for not doing it, but it's also something she really wonders about. And the odd thing is the more she brants, the more she wants to brant -- little inane uninteresting insignificant thoughts start to pop into her head constantly throughout the day that make her think, Oooo! I should brant about this! Or, ooooo! I should brant about that! But at the end of the day, after she hasn't branted because she's just too lazy or conflicted, when she's had just enough distance to think things through and see them clearly, she's glad she didn't bore her brant readers with screeds about how annoying it is to have to spend $50-100 bucks on a shredder to shred junk mail she doesn't even want or how she still can't find her way around the supermarket that was completely redesigned recently.

Which makes her wonder if this entry about all the excuses she has for not writing was brant-worthy or if she should have just found an excuse for not writing about her excuses for not writing.

Beth Teitell's Drinking Problems at the Fountain of Youth

2008-11-15T15:45:00.001-05:00

Laura's been meaning to do a quick brant about her friend Beth Teitell's new book, Drinking Problems at the Fountain of Youth. Some brant readers might think there's a conflict of interest here -- branting about a friend -- but in the spirit of full disclosure, as they used to say in real journalism, Laura already blurbed Beth's book so let the biased blog-rolling begin.

Laura wrote about Beth back on her old brant -- at her actual website -- and it's especially good timing to be writing about Beth now because they have just passed their 2-year "friend anniversary". Laura's not sure other people observe friend anniversaries but she does with new friends (there's tons of friends she met so long ago she has no idea when those anniversaries would be) and Beth is one of those new friends whom she can actually remember meeting and falling in "friend-love" with (read: it's Laura, not the other friends, and the reason she doesn't remember their friend-anniversaries is because she's getting old and can't remember anything).

In a nutshell, it was two years ago when Piece of Work came out and Laura did a phone interview with a reporter from the Boston Herald. The reporter turned out to be Beth Teitell (she now writes for the Boston Globe, FYI), and she was so hilarious on the phone that Laura literally emailed her from her book tour -- she was at the Greenwich Hyatt -- and asked if they could go into business together. Laura of course had no idea what business it would be -- all she knew was that she wanted to kind of attach herself to Beth in some business-related way because Beth was one of the funniest people she'd ever met.

Beth returned Laura's email and said, simply, "Yes," and Laura read the email almost instantly because she was back at the Hyatt Greenwich instead of lingering after her bookstore reading signing books because that was the reading where NOBODY, not a single person, came. Soon after the establishment of their friend-love-relationship, Laura decided to go meet Beth in person in early November: Beth was the speaker at the Wellesley Mother's Forum. To be completely frank, Laura knew who Beth was and Beth knew who Laura was because they were the only two non-blond Jewish women in the room. Anyway, Beth got up and spoke, and Laura almost died laughing, because Beth is like a freakin' stand-up comedienne, but luckily she didn't really die laughing because two days later she had to go have her breast-cancer surgery business.

(One funny note: Beth sent Laura a gorgeous post-op orchid--she'd decided on the orchid because she called the florist where everyone was getting their fancy flowers and somehow managed to extract out of the woman on the phone what everyone else was sending Laura at the hospital so she could get something different. At which point her husband, who is also hilarious, and a doctor, pointed out that clearly florists are not bound by HIPAA privacy laws the way health professionals are).

But enough about how they met and how they meet for lunch every few weeks. It's time to simply say that Drinking Problems at the Fountain of Youth is hilarious, and we all know how unusual it is to find books that are truly laugh-out-loud funny. So if you're looking for some woman's-magazine-y-faux-serious-faux-sociological treatise on women and aging in the new millennium without a hint of irony, this is not your book. What this is is of those books that mixes humor and a wonderfully skewed perspective (during one shopping trip a saleswoman pointed out that Beth's arms were "still good" which caused her to suddenly "hear the biological clock of [her] arms ticking") with actual science and reporting. This elusive combination of humor and science and facts and reporting was a technique that Laura tried to employ in her book on failure but which she failed to execute successfully in that book on failure since her book on failure failed to sell to a publisher (speaking of anniversaries: it was a year ago that "Failure" failed--maybe Laura should start a whole new category of anniversaries: "failure anniversaries"). For instance, Beth wanted to know if there was a way to "light" yourself when you're out in public at a restaurant the way photographers light subjects: that is, to look your best (and as young as possible) should you sit with your back to the window or should you sit facing a window? (For the answer you have to read the book.)

So buy this book. But unless you're going to download it right this second onto your Kindle, here's Beth's "Einstein's Theory of Relativity as it Applies to Aging" -- click here to watch it on YouTube that you can watch while you wait.

And if you're somehow technologically-challenged and can't get the YouTube video to work, here's a great interview with Beth and someone Laura used to know and like from her old publicity days, Andrea Sachs, from Time magazine. And that's a great picture of Beth from that interview. Clearly all the research hasn't aged her one bit. Too bad Laura deepened her naso-labial folds and other laugh-lines significantly as a result of attending Beth's unbelievably funny reading recently at Brookline Booksmith and while devouring the book at home afterwards.

Stephanie Green's Cancer Is The New Black

2008-11-14T20:32:00.011-05:00

Laura would like to welcome the sudden influx of readers to her brant -- like, lots and lots of them, so many, in fact, that she just had to take a minute and say a special hello -- courtesy of Stephanie Green's recent blog about Laura on Cancer Is The New Black. Stephanie and Laura have developed a great on-line Facebook friendship in the past few months because of their common experience with breast cancer and Laura's obsession with Stephanie's fabulous Shu Uemera false eyelashes.

Before Stephanie got breast cancer in her early 30s, she worked for Star Magazine and wrote Dishalicious, a memoir about her experience there. Unfortunately, she was sued before she could sell it -- there was the matter of her pesky confidentiality agreement -- which, Laura can't help but say, must have totally sucked. While Stephanie's figuring out her next book idea -- undoubtedly based in part on her recent experience with breast cancer -- she blogs almost daily (or, at least, way more often and regularly than Laura) at Cancer Is The New Black.

At the risk of invoking that ridiculous little pipsqueak from Project Runway, Stephanie Green is fierce. She is gorgeous and smart and funny and angry and her blog posts are nothing if not a bracing slap -- after which you feel more awake and alert and alive because you've actually been in someone else's head and heart and mind and universe. Stephanie Green's head and heart and mind and universe aren't like anyone else's -- she's as relentless a shopper as she is a cancer survivor. She's fierce about chronicling her surgeries and her chemo and her reconstruction -- the wig-shopping and clothes shopping and what it's like to watch her hair grow back in -- and she's fierce about telling the truth about how having money has helped her in every step of her medical journey and how different her experience would undoubtedly have been had she not had money--money to pursue tests and great surgeons and everything else that has a huge effect on surviving cancer.

But the other thing Stephanie is truly fierce about is her writing -- her blog is funny and smart and honest and sad -- and it's clear that she's writing with a vengeance: not revengeance, but a deep passion that will not be thwarted: not by cancer, and not by a bunch of stupid lawyers protecting a stupid publication.

Laura can't wait to read what Stephanie writes next. And she can't wait to meet Stephanie some day in New York when they will undoubtedly step into a nearby ladies room after lunch and compare surgically reconstructed boobs.

Containing Herself

2008-11-12T22:06:00.021-05:00

Laura hates to be the kind of person who has to point out what a trendsetter she is, but this is one of those instances that she just can't resist. Or, to use the actual tag line of the retail store in question, she's having trouble "containing herself."

Anyone who read Laura's last novel, Piece of Work (both of you), knows about her love of and obsession with The Container Store. She even won a big huge travel basket on the grand opening weekend of their Chestnut Hill store a few years ago and Laura never wins anything! Well, Laura got an email from The Container Store earlier this week informing her that Oprah was doing a whole show called "Clean Up Your Messy House" in which the Container Store and their products were to be prominently featured.

It's not just that Laura feels vindicated -- if Oprah does a show featuring your favorite store then you know you're absolutely not crazy! -- it's more that, to be completely truthful, she's felt really conflicted about the Container Store ever since she realized that no matter how much shit she bought there and brought home, no matter how many awesomely cool neatly designed organizational items for her kitchen and her bathroom and her desk and her bedroom she wasted her hard earned money on -- things were never going to change: She was always going to be a completely disorganized mess and no amount of organizational-porn was

going to save her.

Laura uses the made-up term organizational-porn here -- and she does so at the huge risk of having all those disgusting spammers find her here at her new Blogspot brant -- because that's exactly what The Container Store traffics in. Enter any Container Store and you'll be confronted with all these cool clutter-reducing toys and tools in all these cool shapes and sizes and colors; cruise the aisles and you'll see fantasy groupings of clutter-free displays. Which is what Laura finally realized when the opiate-effects of one of her last shopping trips burned off:

It's not real. It's a fantasy.

She's going to stop with the porn-comparison already because it's getting a little weird and misleading -- don't misunderstand her: The Container Store doesn't sell anything inappropriate -- but she's going to give you an example of how incredibly tempting and overwhelming it is to shop there.

Take the Christmas Ornament Storage Box Organizer. The minute you lay eyes on one of these things you want it -- even if you're not Christian.

I mean, look at it -- it's like candy. It's green and red and it's plastic and it has flaps and it has those egg-carton-type compartments into which all your treasured tree ornaments can be safely stored and "snuggled." You just want to buy one. The problem is, there's like five or six or seven or eight different kinds of Christmas Ornament Storage Box Organizers to pick from:

There's the "Noble Ornament Storage Chest" with it's zippered fabric construction:

There's "Holiday Storage Boxes" with those little metal handles:

and "Jubilee Ornament Storage Chests" with their festive patterned exterior:

and "Archival Ornament Storage Boxes" which elevate the notion of storing Christmas ornaments by introducing a serious preservationistic-ideal:

Laura could go on and on -- literally! -- because there are more models -- but the point is that not only are the amount of choices completely overwhelming (just like Staples, but don't get her started on office-supplies-shopping again -- refer instead to an earlier post she wrote about trying to decide on office supplies but being rendered completely indecisive and paralyzed by the ridiculous amount of choices available). It's also unrealistic to think that buying one of those ornament storage boxes -- whichever one she bought -- would solve her problems.

What problems -- deeper, emotional, existential, psychological -- is Laura looking to solve which can't be solved by one of those fabulous storage boxes? you might be wondering. And that's an excellent question. And it's a question that should be asked every time she even goes near a Container Store: What bigger problems is she trying to solve besides the obvious clutter-related problems? In the case of the Christmas Ornament Storage Organizer, the larger problem is this: Laura is Jewish and her husband is Catholic. Though he is non-practicing and wants to raise Ben entirely Jewish. While most Jewish women would think, Hey! This is great! I dodged a bullet with the inter-faith-marriage problem! -- Laura is thinking something entirely different:

She's thinking: Hey! I didn't marry a non-Jew to NOT have a Christmas Tree! If I'd wanted a menorrah-only life, I would have married someone from Hebrew School! Laura's thinking: I'm legitimately entitled to the Christmas tree and I want the Christmas tree!

There were a few years there where Brendan forewent the tree -- both because of his religious ambivalence and because of something much less complicated and complex: sheer laziness. You see, every time Laura would mention the tree -- When are we getting the tree? Where are we putting the tree? Don't you think we should go ornament shopping? Shouldn't we start untangling the lights and popping and stringing popcorn garlands now -- in August -- so we'll have them ready by December? -- Brendan would roll his eyes and start bemoaning the cost, the shlepping, the mess, the fire hazard issues, the clean-up and disposal -- he was almost Jewish, in fact, in his complete negativity -- and Laura would realize that he was not living up to his end of the bargain as her Trophy Shiksa husband.

For the record -- and this is an important distinction to Laura and part of a piece on the differences between "Real Jews" and "Fake Jews" she did last year for The Huffington Post -- but Laura has never understood couples where both spouses are Jewish but they have a Christmas tree. That to her is weird. Very weird. No. What she's talking about is the legitimacy of the inter-faith tree-entitlement. She--I mean, Ben -- deserves to celebrate both holidays with all their trappings and customs and symbols and tree-related-fun-stuff.

Wow. She really went off on a screed there -- and she's going to try to bring it back to the main issue: which is what The Container Store is actually selling and what Laura is actually craving and seeking to buy when she goes there: control. While she thinks she's buying organizing solutions and systems and things that are going to help her control the madness of her life, in reality all she's buying is the myth and the fantasy and the illusion of control. Because no one can truly control their life, no matter how much cool stuff they buy to help them become neater and more organized. Which means she's just going to have to figure out a way to cope with the chaos in her life without resorting to organizational-porn.

Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!

2008-11-07T11:11:00.033-05:00

So big news: Laura left her house yesterday.

Yes, it's true: she actually left her house and left Newton last night to go into Boston to see the NPR show, "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!" get taped. The show was at the Wang Theater, and the reason she got free tickets was because her friend, Amy Dickinson, who writes the syndicated advice column "Ask Amy" for The Chicago Tribune, was one of the panelists (as she often is). But as so frequently happens when Laura leaves her house and leaves Newton to actually go somewhere interesting:

[Wait wait...Don't tell me!]

It was pouring.

Laura can't tell you how many times this has happened: If it's not raining, then there's almost always some kind of rare biblical weather thing happening -- record heat and humidity, severe storm and tornado warnings, sudden blizzards. You might think she's making this up but here are only a few actual examples to prove her point:

When Laura was four and a half she had a ruptured appendix. Of course, this medical emergency just happened to

take place during the Blizzard of '67 which means she was very lucky to get to the hospital with an hour to spare...
When she drove to Buffalo last June to work with matchmaker extraordinnaire and co-author Patti Novak, she had to pull off the highway about 15 times to heed the "severe thunderstorm and tornado" warnings. Every time she pulled into a New York State Thruway rest stop, she would feel hugely grateful that she wasn't flying to Buffalo and could thus control her stopping and starting -- that is, until she realized she had no idea what to do if a tornado just

happened to hit the rest-stop.
On the Limoliner bus back from New York last December -- she'd gone to meet with Michael J. Fox's father in law, life/financial coach Stephen Pollan, who'd just written a book that she wanted to know more about because she was in desperate need of life and financial coaching -- it started to snow. But because Laura was on the bus, it was practically a white-out. And when the bus pulled into Boston she was knee-deep in almost 7 inches of it (needless to say, she wasn't dressed for the weather). The cab ride to Newton was not only long, but very very cold.

OK, Laura could go on and on and on -- obviously there's some connection between cataclysmic weather patterns and her infrequent travel schedule -- but she's going to get back to the big story: leaving the house. So, once Laura got in the car and headed downtown in the pouring rain, another typical thing happened:

[Wait wait...don't tell me!]

Laura took a wrong turn.

Taking a wrong turn is a euphemism for getting fucking lost, and this is something that happens all the effing time, practically every day in fact, even if Laura is just going down the street to the grocery store and back. Laura has such a shitty sense of direction that she spends a good portion of any drive trying to second guess her choices: that is, if she "feels" or "senses" or "thinks" she should go left, she quickly self-corrects and decides she should go right. Except that then she'll second guess her second-guessing and wonder if she should self-correct one more time just to be sure. If you think it sounds confusing here in this brant, imagine what it's like in

Laura's head, as she careens constantly into the unknown and, more importantly, into the incorrect direction. The sad irony is that Laura's other car, the Volvo wagon, came equipped with a GPS system, but that's the car her husband uses -- her husband who has an unerring sense of direction. Her car didn't come with one and she has been too cheap to put one in, preferring instead to waste hundreds of

dollars of gas driving around cluelessly, trying to figure out where she is and how to get home.

Since last night was no different, it didn't take long for Laura to drop the directions to the Wang Theater on the floor of the car, too far out of reach to grasp, and then get all nervous about which exit off the Pike she was supposed to take. Amazingly enough, she actually took the right exit -- only to screw it up several hundred feet later on the exit ramp, when she found herself on a dark deserted access road into the dark deserted above ground parking facility of South Station. After much profanity (Laura was really glad Ben wasn't in the car, otherwise she would have owed him like $400 [they have a deal: $1 "owed" for every swear she says--Laura is going to have to take out a second mortgage in order to pay him off]), she was able to quickly correct her mistake and find her way back to the right road and, eventually, in the increasing downpour and decreasing visibility, to the actual theatre, where she quickly pulled into a parking lot. Which is when the THIRD thing that always happens to Laura happened to Laura:

[Wait wait....don't tell me!]

She didn't have enough cash.

Most of the time, just like last night, when Laura doesn't have enough cash, there's usually another one of the above factors in play: i.e. not only did she not have enough cash for the cash-only parking, but she had to get cash in the pouring rain. (Sidebar: It's a good thing Laura's husband wasn't with her because Laura's lack of cash in situations like this is kind of a pet peeve. And understandably so!) So there she was, fighting with her stupid umbrella, leaving her car with the attendant, then running down the street into kind of a scary convenience store where there was one of those no-name cash machines. Laura was afraid to look at how much the

"convenience-fee" was -- it was probably almost as much as the cash she was taking out -- and once she made her withdrawal she quickly ran back to the lot and paid the fee. Wet, frazzled, and full of self-loathing about having gotten lost AND not having enough cash AND getting soaking wet in the pouring rain almost made Laura want to turn around and go home. But that would have negated everything she'd worked so hard to achieve. And so she pressed on.

Laura got her ticket and sat alone and a few minutes later three women sat down in the three empty seats next to her. They were the kind of women you instantly want to talk to -- they were funny and friendly and one of them, Paula from Concord, actually asked her if she wanted anything, drink-wise, from the lobby when she was making the trip -- and suddenly, despite her shyness and her awkwardness and her stiffness -- the effects of not leaving the house or Newton often enough -- Laura had infiltrated their little group and was glomming on to their conversation! Laura couldn't believe her luck -- after battling the elements (rain, getting lost, no cash) things had turned around in such a positive way:

[Wait wait...Don't tell me!]

Laura was pontificating about her love of the Boston Accent and how angry it makes her that the Boston Accent is always butchered in movies that are set in Boston.

Well, wouldn't you know, the woman next to her (the wife of Paula from Concord), who actually is not an actual native Bostonian though she's lived here for almost 20 years (and in New England, that's still not enough to be considered anything other than an outsider), told Laura a joke -- a Boston Accent joke that Laura had never heard! It was SO good that's she's going to repeat it here (with apologies for her clumsiness in the retelling):

"You know how homophones are words that sound the same but are spelled differently and mean different things? Well, "lama" with one "L" is the religious figure, like the Dalai Lama. "Lama" with two "Ls" is a Llama, the animal. And "Lama" with three "Ls" is a "3 L lama" -- or in Boston speak, a "three-alahhhhhhma" -- meaning a wicked huge fire!!"

Howling with laughter, Laura felt like she'd met her soulmates, which made her suddenly self-conscious: she didn't want to appear so desperate for human social interaction that she would infringe on three complete strangers' evening out. And so Laura collected herself and turned her attention to the show which was, thankfully, finally starting.

What was really funny -- besides spending this entire brant talking NOT about the show itself which was hilarious and brilliant, so much so that she got exhausted from clapping, and talking instead about everything leading up to it -- was that it was basically a dork convention -- a huge theater full of a thousand NPR nerds who were ecstatic (and that's an understatement) about seeing their erudite radio heroes in person. Laura uses the words dork and nerd with complete affection and compassion and empathy since, while not an NPR geek per se, she considers herself to be a dork and a nerd herself. In fact, Laura feels like she's quickly joining the ranks of aforementioned NPR geeks since she now listens every morning and afternoon on her way to and from Ben's new school -- and during all the hours of being directionally-challenged immediately following those to-and-froms.

The best part of the evening was getting to visit with Amy, whose new amazing brilliant book, The Mighty Queens of Freeville, a memoir, coming out in February 2009 from Hyperion, Laura will plug in her next brant. Which:

[Wait wait...don't tell me!]

Will come a really really really long time after this brant.

OMG. Ben Gets His First Rave Review

2008-10-30T15:43:00.011-04:00

Laura can't believe this: there's a review of Saturday's School of Rock Led Zeppelin show in the Boston Phoenix!! The review is a bit harsh, and, Laura thinks, undeservedly so, since those kids freakin' ROCKED and since School of Rock's Boston musical director Bill Galatis and general manager Anderson Mar, not to mention all the teachers, should be applauded for their incredible hard work and the heart and soul they put into that school every single day.

(They should also be rewarded for being incredibly talented musicians in their own right who, despite being supremely cool on every level, are incredibly forgiving of us middle-aged suburban parents reliving our teenage music-crushes through these performances and weekly rehearsals and never ever ever make us feel un-cool which they could so easily do. Because we are. And it would be like shooting fish in a bucket, or whatever that saying is. But that's another story, and one that she keeps meaning to write to the School of Rock's Corporate Office...)

Right at the end of this not-very-complimentary review -- shockingly and amazingly -- Ben is singled out as having successfully "channeled" John Bonham (Led Zeppelin drummer)!!! Of course, the reporter says it better than that so go click on the link. Also be sure to read all the comments!!!

Transparency

2008-10-29T10:45:00.007-04:00

Back in the proverbial day, when Laura was in elementary school, the word transparency referred to the plastic sheet used on an overhead projector to teach math or science or English. The teacher would turn the projector on, line it up with the pull-down screen at the front of the classroom, and slap on the transparency so everyone could see it. Invariably, of course, the transparency was upside down, or backwards, or in some other way projectionally-impaired, but eventually the teacher would get it right and point at the clear plastic sheet and write on it with some kind of erasable waxy pencil.

Lately, Laura keeps hearing the word transparency everywhere -- in business articles, in political articles, in blogs. It's one of those words that has suddenly caught on and everybody's using it to describe openness and the notion that when everything is visible people will be inspired to participate: if they feel in on the process, whatever that process is, then they feel part of that process and empowered to act.

Obviously Laura agrees that transparency is a good thing, you know, in general. But she's confused about the notion of transparency in blogs: specifically, she just doesn't understand how one can be completely transparent in what they blog about (family, friends, neighbors, people they hate) and expect to live to write another blog! Really. Like, how does that work?! Laura knows tons of bloggers who blog about their lives in really honest and open and -- wait, here comes the word! -- transparent ways -- in fact, she reads several of these kinds of blogs daily and is, quite frankly, addicted to their frankness! Sometimes she'll read an entry, enjoying all the juicy anonymous-ized bits, and wonder what will happen when that anonymous-ized person (who really isn't that anonymous, probably, among the blogger's friends) reads the blog? Does the person about whom the unflattering or too-revealing blog was written email the blogger or go up to them in the supermarket and say, Hey, WTF? Does the person ignore the blog and the blogger and pretend they never read it and that it doesn't exist? How do they deal with their shame and anger at being written about -- or, outed, for whatever the blogger outed them for -- in such a public forum?

Given Laura's traffic stats, she probably wouldn't really have this problem. She could probably write about anyone and everyone who is annoying or irritating or jerky with no fear of repercussion since in order to have repercussions, you have to have readers! But seriously. What is the deal? Or, not to put too fine a point on it, How do they get away with it?

If anyone has thoughts on this topic of transparency, Laura hopes you'll leave a comment. See, that would prove that transparency does indeed work. By being transparent about her confusion with transparency, Laura hopes you'll feel like part of the process -- her process -- of branting and thus feel inspired and empowered to act and voice your thoughts.

More About The New Book

2008-10-27T13:19:00.008-04:00

Laura realized that in her haste yesterday to set up her Emergency Brant she failed to provide more details about the new book, Get Over Yourself! which she wrote with matchmaker-extraordinaire Patti Novak. So Laura's going to post the back-ad from the book jacket to give readers of her Brant (both of them) (hi Janet!) a better sense of what the book is about. Click on the image to enlarge it so you can read it.

Get Over Yourself! will be officially published on December 30, 2008 by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House (where Laura used to work). For more information about the book, or about Patti, or about the book AND Patti, please leave Laura a comment and she'll get back to you with the information you need.

The New Book

2008-10-27T00:48:00.008-04:00

Since Laura went through all the trouble of moving her Brant so she could post photos and visuals, she's going to attempt to post the book jacket of the new book she wrote with matchmaker-extraordinaire Patti Novak: Get Over Yourself!

OMG. That was so easy. One two three and there it was! Boy is she wishing she switched a year ago!

Laura's New Brant Home

2008-10-26T23:37:00.000-04:00

Laura's moving. She's moving her brant to a new place because the place where her old brant was mysteriously stopped allowing her to post photos. She tried everything -- and she means everything -- to figure out how to make it work -- Laura, just for the record, isn't someone who just leaves when the going gets rough -- but no matter what she did, no matter how hard she tried, no matter how many times she tried to grasp the techno-speak of her previous blog-company, she failed. After months of not being able to post photos, she stopped branting altogether because it just wasn't fun anymore. And that's when she knew she had to take matters into her own hands and relocate to a place that would be more hospitable to her photo-posting needs.

And so here she is. At blogspot. Where lots of people have their blogs. Laura's hoping this new home for her brant will make her want to brant again -- and more regularly -- because it seems altogether easier. We'll see. Because while Laura likes to blame everything -- her boiler, her clogs, her bout with lice, her blog-hoster -- we all know that the main reason Laura doesn't brant for months at a time is because she's just plain lazy.

Here's hoping the move gives her a big jolt of energy and a renewed sense of branting-purpose.