Yay! The Breakfast Manifesto, New York magazine’s breakfast extravaganza to which I contributed the piece on eggs has been nominated for a James Beard Award.

I love eggs. I love that the whole cholesterol/fat stigma they used to bear has been proven inaccurate. I love a hard-boiled egg more than maybe any other food. I love a farm-fresh egg and yes there is a difference between the supermarket eggs and the greenmarket ones, in taste and nutrition. If I had anything approaching a green thumb, I’d move to upstate New York and be and be a farmer and raise chickens. Maybe.

The work is coming very slowly, refracted, refractory. I hear my name like it’s coming through water. I left the blank page and went uptown.

I looked up “refractory” after I typed it because I didn’t want to confuse it with “refectory.” OS X’s Oxford American Dictionary offers the example his refractory pony. I love this.

I hadn’t been to the Cloisters before. Almost one year ago Ben & I rode bikes over the George Washington Bridge and back and then went to Fort Tryon Park. It’s one of those memories that’s still very present, I see the day crisply, it felt like leaving New York. I wanted to get away from this and go to that.

Really I wanted my own cloister. The Cloisters themselves are lovely, but they’re a museum, and filled with people, babies, shovers. The atrophy of experience: digital cameras trained on pietas, dry fountains, unicorn tapestries. There is a terrace that wraps around the building from which you can see the Hudson and I guess New Jersey. I was looking for quiet. I found it in the Heather Garden of the park outside.

In the grass on the hill I read the The Last Life by Claire Messud, and the gears slowed. I didn’t have any expectations for clarity. Vague hopes that The Project (there’s always a project, but this time it’s a large looming one) would crystallize or stand down or make a tenuous promise to stop confounding, but I read and looked at the river and thought some about my block, where I would have been had I not caught the train.

Something broke. I had one of the tiny Field Notes books with me and things started to make sense. I diagrammed ideas, wrote myself notes for later concerning the manageability of the work in case I was seized by anything resembling doubt masquerading as procrastination.

Oh! The last time I scribbled about museum-going, Lynn & I went to the Dia:Beacon in the Hudson Valley. I took these pictures on our trip, which I’m honored to report are featured in the latest issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review, accompanying Lawrence Wechsler’s (one of my favorite writers) article on Robert Irwin. You can’t see the photos on the VQR site, but you should consider checking out the hard copy for Wechsler’s always riveting prose. Here are the photos:

Now I’ve got spring fever. I’m a mess of allergies and sunlight and already mourning summer’s passing. This winter was kind of the pits. Better things are drawn to summer, they want to happen then. When I finished a perfect 70-degree run last weekend, Lance Armstrong’s voice came eerily on via my Nike+ iPod thingy and congratulated me on my longest run to date. Which is not true, since I’ve only had this gadget for about a year or so and I just recently allowed it to talk to me. Am I inclined to run farther to win Lance’s love again? Yes. Yes I am. Why am I so easily seduced?

I think it’s spring. The construction has abated, the days are long and therefore manageable. There is enough space in them for coffee on the corner and walking to the cleaners in Gramercy and getting A Moveable Feast from the library and seeing a movie about people who won’t feel whole until they’re paralyzed. Yeah, I saw that movie, Quid Pro Quo, tonight. Nick Stahl is aging strangely but attractively. Vera Farmiga is several varieties of troubling. The movie’s got some moments. But then it’s got some moments and you’re just like who greenlit that.

Days wide and warm, in which I wander listening to back episodes of the Fresh Air podcast. Springtime, you count. I will wear a daisy in my hair.

I wrote about where to dispose of your old electronics in NYC.

You know it’s amazing how much time & toil can go into something like this. The amount of fact-finding research that goes into something so seemingly straightforward is never visible to the eye after it’s published. I’d venture it’s easier to write a long, expansive feature than it is to write a no-full-sentences chart.

The info is quite useful. I just saw an air conditioner on the street outside my apartment yesterday. I’ve become more of pious recycler since researching this. I wonder if I was subliminally influenced to use the word “pious” because I’ve been up since 6am and am on my second round of Morning Edition and they are going nuts over the Pope’s visit. And the airline merger. And taxes.

Dump Your Junk [NY Mag]

So Conde Nast has this very fun online TV show called The Daily Special and today I am a guest on it. If you go to their site and leave your favorite bit of advice, you can win a signed copy (this time a real book included!) of TGGTAE.

In other news: It’s wet, winter continues, MoDo irks, acne resurfaces, deadlines are met only to be replaced by new ones, blogging frustrates, Pilates offers some relief, or at least connects mind & body, so oft at odds these days. These days.

I miss writing about pop culture. Once upon a time it was all I did all day long and it was grand. Today I go back to my roots on the Huffington Post.

While writing this post, “When the Soundtrack Is Better Than the Movie,” I had this sensation that I hadn’t had since writing for Girls On. Like writing editorial about entertainment could be fun and funny and in some small way important. Because it was diverting and it made you laugh and agree and disagree and it was a respite and it didn’t make you feel that dirty for that long for not focusing your energies on far worthier causes. Like monks being killed in Burma. Which makes writing about movie soundtracks seem…a tad insignificant.

The Girls On writers were phenomenal. I wasn’t even a founder of the site–I arrived after the original Girls had departed and we had just been bought by Oxygen and the whole thing was a late-Internet era dream project and in the blink of an eye it was over. But we did some amazing stuff. I remember the Judy Blume Retrospective, where all the writers chose their favorite Judy Blume books and wrote about reading them as teens and then again in their 20s. I remember the first piece I wrote when I started my job, a review of that TV trainwreck Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?, and how it was 1000 words too long and totally OTT but it was funny so we ran it anyway (maybe minus 500 words). That was the thing. If it made us laugh, it ran.

Now there are zillions of entertainment sites and every mainstream newspaper has its media critics online and we’re not the blazing funny-lady pioneers we once were. But it was actually a Girls On writer who hooked me up with the HuffPost to begin with, specifically to write about entertainment, which I plan to do far more frequently if I can manage to figure out how the posting system works and I can manage to get my mitts on some preview screeners of Gossip Girl. Or at least watch it when it airs.

I taped an interview with the lovely Dave and Debbie of the Q102 Breakfast Show in Dublin the other day, and from the location of my visitors indicated by my super-secret site files, it must have aired. So top o’ the mornin’, my Irish friends. Call me psychic (please!), but something tells me you’re wondering which six fashion items every woman must own.

Okay, to be honest, I was surprised to be asked that question, because it’s not actually technically in my book but part of an interview I did with the New York Post which you can read in its entirety here.

But let’s revise for the weather and fashion particularities of Eire, shall we?

Six Things Every Dubliner Must Own
A Throughly Subjective List by Melissa Kirsch, author of The Girl’s Guide to Absolutely Everything

1. A good coat. I stand by this one. it doesn’t have to be black (as most New Yorkers’ coats are) but it does have to be waterproof. You can certainly get yourself a swell, warm raincoat in Dublin and if you don’t have one, I’m not sure how you’re faring, but I’m pretty sure it’s not well.

2. Boots. A good pair of warm boots that you can dress up with a skirt, wear with jeans, slosh through puddles, etc. Let’s make them knee-high. Let’s stop obsessing about the dampness of the UK and move on.

3. A good bra. This is universal. Debbie mentioned in the interview it can make you look thinner. Yes, this is true, but it will also make you feel much better about yourself. Go to the old-lady girdle shop and get yourself measured. Let Marge the Bra Lady go to second base with you and come out a new woman. You’re looking for support, no spillover, and don’t be concerned about what the size is. Chances are you’re wearing the wrong size, and usually but not always this can be remedied by a bigger band size and smaller cup size but that’s not always true. Measure. Go. Now.

4. Your version of the Little Black Dress. Perhaps it isa little black dress. Maybe it’s a slightly less-than-little but still flattering and not at all camping tent-like brown dress. Or a good-fitting pair of jeans that you can dress up or down. I’m into clothes that do Day-to-Night Barbie duty.

5. A sturdy, fashionable bag. Designer bags aren’t all they’re knocked up (or knocked off) to be. A bag you love by an unknown designer is going to last you much longer than a Chanel reproduction or a super-expensivo Marc Jacobs tote that anyone who cares will be able to pinpoint to a particular season. I like sites like Etsy for cool, original, well-made accessories.

6. Sunscreen. I know you think because it’s slightly grey a lot that you aren’t getting sun damage. The sun is still shining and emitting its turn-your-skin-the-consistency-of-an-old-Gucci-bag rays even when it’s cloudy.

I offer you these tips not because I think you are desperate to know them (although you might be) but because people like tips and at 6am EST it was very difficult to remember all the things I’d told the Post months ago or to speak in bullet points at all. Who speaks in bullet points naturally? Not me.

PS The book is available from Amazon.co.uk right this very second. Tarry not, my bonny lasses (and lads).

The Girl’s Guide to Absolutely Everything is ChickSpeak’s “Must Read” for August. There’s a very lovely interview with me there as well. Because you don’t know enough about me. Well, you don’t know what I’d do with a magic wand if I had one — which I am not saying I don’t –but you don’t know that, and you can find out in this most delightful of interviews. If I do say so myself. And I do.

They’re going to be giving away two signed copies of the book later this month, so check back if you still haven’t bought it. (PS What are you waiting for? )

In case you want to go hang out with the book, my sister tells me that the book is large and in charge on the table next to the register at Barnes & Noble. Go visit it. Heck, let’s have our own giveaway.

A signed hardcover (rare! collector’s item!) to anyone who sends in a photo of him/herself with the book at their local bookstore.

Fun! Who doesn’t love free stuff? Free, possibly priceless stuff? Offer good while supplies last.

Would you believe me if I told you it was some of the weirdest and best and also most hilarious ice cream I’ve ever had? Pop rocks in your ice cream! That is fun ice cream! Maybe not for every day, but once a year, come on: impossible not to be thrilled by.

I’m back in the hottest city ever after a long stay upstate, where I not only went to a rainy Fourth of July cookout in a log cabin in a town improbably named “Andes,” I also wandered several sleepy towns along the Hudson Valley, had several iced coffees and smelled nature, which you notice when you get out of New York, you notice the smell of the trees. I slept. I decided to give up on The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe and read American Sucker by David Denby instead. I saw an opossum (not a possum) up close. Very cute if you can get over the looooong rat tail.

Meanwhile, in the blogosphere.

Today, I blog on the Huffington Post.

I am trying, albeit not very hard, to care about Paris Hilton. I would like her story a lot better if she had been in a serious lockup and not the jail infirmary due to an undisclosed malady.

Between you and me, can we please acknowledge that I was into The View before it was “cool” to be into The View? I’ve been writing about my deep love for the show since I started this disco train over a year ago, and I’d just like some credit as an early adopter, one who was in the stew during the thin broth of the Meredith/Star days. Thank god, then, that someone knows where to go for genuine, informed commentary on the Rosie/Elisabeth conflict — in today’s Philadelphia Daily News, I try mightily to defend Rosie against the pick-on-someone-your-own-sizers, but the reporter was having none of it.

“I think there is some truth to the idea that the bully is the most sensitive,” said Melissa Kirsch, author of “The Girl’s Guide to Absolutely Everything” (Workman Publishing, $15.95). “When it comes to our female friends, it’s usually the ones who put up the steeliest fronts who are the most sensitive in the long run.”

Read the whole article here.

Sigh. I tried. Not printed are all the things I said about how a good friend is on your side, defends you, whether at a cocktail party or on national television. And how, if you’re particulary upset about something and need a friend to go to the mat for you, you have to communicate that. Please let it be known I also feel like a total idiot even talking about Rosie & Elisabeth as if there’s something to be gleaned from their Fight of Spurious Provenance about our real-life friend conflicts.

Just in case:

Hey real & virtual friends,

If someone ever mistakes a comment I make about the administration as labelling the troops as terrorists, I’d appreciate it if you’d come to my defense on Larry King, because I don’t think that and you know it. I’m communicating this to you now because I’m concerned that you might not know how strongly I do not want to be branded a traitor in the international media, and you might side with Joe Scarborough against me. Oh, and if you hear that people are talking about me on Larry King, or Scarborough Country, could you please text me? I have a feeling that would sell a lot of books, and that is also important to me. Also, please don’t talk smack about me to In Touch. Thanks!

Love, Melissa.