Thank you, Lola Ogunnaike, for taking one my bêtes noires by its wretched horns and laying bare the email etiquette-less-ness of the world at large. In today’s Sunday Styles section, she exposes exactly what I’ve been trying to explain to troubled correspondents the globe over. Read the whole article but take special note of the first half, in which I finally find my soul mate in a chap improbably but sort of perfectly named “Chad Troutwine”:

CHAD TROUTWINE, an entrepreneur in Malibu, Calif., was negotiating a commercial lease earlier this year for a building he owns in the Midwest. Though talks began well, they soon grew rocky. The telltale sign that things had truly devolved? The sign-offs on the e-mail exchanges with his prospective tenant.

“As negotiations started to break down, the sign-offs started to get decidedly shorter and cooler,” Mr. Troutwine recalled. “In the beginning it was like, ‘I look forward to speaking with you soon’ and ‘Warmest regards,’ and by the end it was just ‘Best.’ ” The deal was eventually completed, but Mr. Troutwine still felt as if he had been snubbed.

What’s in an e-mail sign-off? A lot, apparently. Those final few words above your name are where relationships and hierarchies are established, and where what is written in the body of the message can be clarified or undermined. In the days before electronic communication, the formalities of a letter, either business or personal, were taught to every third-grader; sign-offs — from “Sincerely” to “Yours truly” to “Love” — came to mind without much effort. …

Although salutations that begin messages can be tricky — there is a world of difference, it seems, between a “Hi,” a “Hello” and a “Dear” — the sign-off is the place where many writers attempt to express themselves, even when expressing personality, as in business correspondence, is not always welcome. …

Mr. Troutwine is not alone in thinking that an e-mail sender who writes “Best,” then a name, is offering something close to a brush-off. He said he chooses his own business sign-offs in a descending order of cordiality, from “Warmest regards” to “All the best” to a curt “Sincerely.”

When Kim Bondy, a former CNN executive, e-mailed a suitor after a dinner date, she used one of her preferred closings: “Chat soon.” It was her way of saying, “The date went well, let’s do it again,” she said.

She may have been the only one who thought that. The return message closed with the dreaded “Best.” It left her feeling as though she had misread the evening. “I felt like, ‘Oh, that’s kind of formal. I don’t think he liked me,’ ” she said, laughing. “A chill came with the ‘Best.’ ” They have not gone out since.

“Best” does have its fans, especially in the workplace, where it can be an all-purpose step up in warmth from messages that end with no sign-off at all, just the sender coolly appending his or her name.

“I use ‘Best’ for all of my professional e-mails,” said Kelly Brady, a perky publicist in New York. “It’s friendly, quick and to the point.”

Lola Ogunnaike and Chad Troutwine, let’s be pen pals.

Hopelessly devoted,
Melissa

Previously:

Oh Morrissey. Does it have to be so? Not according to this theory.

Over lunch a few weeks ago, my friend Gretchen, who’s becoming an expert on happiness through a book she’s writing, mentioned something about how her sister, who’s a writer in Hollywood, found a way to eliminate a lot of unhappiness in her life by believing that if the people around her succeed, this mean she’ll succeed too.

I was misquoting this intriguing idea all over town so I asked Gretchen to clarify, which she did, in a blog post. I’m tempted just to reprint the whole thing because I’ve been thinking about it all week but I’ll just draw your attention to my favorite part:

My sister always says, “People succeed in groups.” Now, my sister works in a notoriously competitive, jealous, back-biting industry: she’s a TV writer in Los Angeles.

It happened that a few years ago, a friend of hers scored a major success.

“Do you have the funny feeling?” I asked her. The “funny feeling” is the term the Big Man and I use to describe the uncomfortable feeling you get when a friend or peer has a major accomplishment. You feel happy for that person, but also envious, and also insecure and anxious about your own success.

She answered, “Maybe a little bit, but I remind myself that people succeed in groups. It’s great for him, and it’s also good for me.”

By contrast, I have a friend who describes her brother as having a zero-sum attitude toward good fortune: if something good happens to someone else, he feels like something good is less likely to happen to him. As a result, he can’t be happy for anyone else.

Now, you might argue about whether it’s true that people succeed in groups. I happen to think it is true, but it’s debatable. But whether or not it’s objectively true, it’s an attitude that will make a person much happier. After all, your friend doesn’t get the promotion, or not, depending on whether it makes you happy or unhappy, but your attitude about that promotion will affect your happiness.

I have been working on a similar idea over the past few years, the belief that a writer has absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain by helping another writer out. This came out of a feeling that it was a zero-sum game; I noticed that I and writers I knew were cagey and begrudging of contacts, editors’ names, advice, empathy…I think because happiness or success feels so fleeting, and we hold on tight to our own little shred of it, terrified someone’s going to bite on our good time.

But it totally changes your perspective if you think “people succeed in groups.” There’s the karmic component, of course, which I’ll let you consider in your own faith-tinged way. Then there’s the way it makes you feel. If you can truly be happy for others’ success, believing that their doing well means good things are happening for you, it eliminates a whole slew of things to feel anxious about. You’re driven to help other people, to feel buoyed by their good news, and you’re generally more pleasant to hang out with when you’re helping people out, rather than viewing their lives through the lens of how it might negatively impact your own.

Thinking about Gretchen’s sister’s theory makes me want to surround myself with people who are succeeding, and to spend less time with people who tend to get tripped up by their envy, preventing them from tending to their own stuff. I’m not saying I’m not frequently one of those people, but I’m working on it.

I wrote about this when I was reading Anne Lamott way back in the early days of Chickarina.
Previously: Be Kind, Breathe, and Take a Walk

Hey check it out. My new column at KGB Bar Lit, My Secret Library, is published at long last, looking quite fetching and extolling the virtues of the super-mod, as we should all do as an essential part of our daily ablutions.

NB: I would have put this under *News* on the homepage, but let it be known that I am on a PC for the week (poor, barely-breathing iBaby’s getting her guts torn out, god please let the child survive the surgery) and I am unsure how to make many changes. What I would like to know is, who are you PC people and how do you do it? What is this unfriendly XP universe into which I have slipped? You’re so unfriendly, so obsessed with viruses, so black-keyboarded. A hex on the “Start” menu and right-clicking! What fresh hell is this?

So in The Book, I give lots of advice about how to come up with an exercise regimen you’ll actually stick with. Condensed here:

1. Choose something you like, that you’ll actually stick with, because if you have a nervous breakdown every time you think about going to step class, that’s not your kind of exercise.

2. Mix things up for balance and variety. If you try to do 45 minutes on the elliptical trainer every single morning, you will get bored and hate yourself and your elliptical trainer (you own an elliptical trainer? that’s sort of cool). You know: run, swim, bike, lift some dumbbells, go nuts on one of those giant rubber balls that I secretly love.

3. Keep your workouts short enough that enough time passes between workouts for you to actually want to do it again. If you spend 2 hours at the gym every time you, but then you’re so burnt out you only go once a month, that’s not fun.

…&c.
(That’s supposed to pique your appetite so you’ll run out and buy it to find out what else I say that could and actually definitely will change your life.)

Okay, so I know all these things, but how often do I actually take my own advice? So this week I varied my running route and actually sought out the park by the river rather than just going on the paths through the housing development (oh, to live in the wide open country where one can run and frolic in streets and yards!) like I always do. I ran by the river, through a playground (watch out, tykes!), around a baseball field, I ran into a big soft track and did a few laps, ran back and couldn’t resist a spin around the housing development (you can’t keep a good girl down). But it was exhilarating. I felt like I’d discovered an extra room in my apartment, you know, that dream that’s always so sad to wake up from, where you realize you have a wing to your house you never knew existed, like the closet has a fake back wall and there’s a giant bathroom with a clawfoot tub back there you never knew about. It was almost like that, except it wasn’t a dream!

Then Ben and I rode up the east side on our bikes today, which was less than halcyon, since the path dead-ends at 42nd Street and you end up on the highway (oops!) but we’ve been riding most weekends on the west side, which is sort of like a boardwalk full of happy beachcombers jogging and biking and rollerblading and you could almost believe you were someplace tropical if you don’t look to your left. Ben likes to remind me that these bike rides are in no way strenous, but I say it’s all exercise, and another tip I have in the book is to find a “workout buddy” (I hope I don’t use that term, but it is accurate, if dorky). Better that we should be riding bikes while we chat than, I don’t know, watching one more documentary about lefty politics, our former favorite weekly practice. I mean, we’re still going to see Iraq in Fragments (I hope) but the riding feels as enriching.

So I’m here to say that a super-busy week in which several things could potentially have put me in rotten spirits was actually quite blissful, because I followed my own advice. You should too. Let me know how it goes.

Previously:
The Long Run, Hubris

Not content to just watch The View at home, my unlikely obsession reached a boiling point last night when I convinced my friend Lynn to go with me to see Joy Behar perform live. Stop judging me. I shot a movie!

As Lynn pointed out, we were the youngest people in the room by about forty years. Joy’s jokes were written in about 1993 (she covered such “Hot Topics” as Mel Gibson, Lorena Bobbitt and Joan Collins’ face lifts.) Even reading from notes, however, she was still, I have to admit, hilarious–if in a very geriatric, cruise-ship, PG-13, Cathy cartoon, Borscht Belt kind of way.

Here, she does a Borat and sings (sings!) an original (and ironic! and sort of bawdy!) song! How the audience laughed! How I love Joy!

I promise to be hip and post-post-ironic in every way possible–except in my deeply felt belief that Joy Behar is a charming, funny, feminist, politically interesting comedian. Oh dear god.

Previously on The View:

It’s amazing. The paperpack is gorgeous, but if you can get your mitts on a copy of the hardcover (try here, B&N seems to be the fastest bet), you might just faint, as I nearly did, when I saw it. My photos don’t do it justice. It’s better than bargain basement wardrobe week on The View. Your Christmas gift recipients will adore you forever. Me too.

Because I am not yet up to speed on how to use this new server.
But I have a tutorial scheduled for Thursday night, so after that, watch out.

There will be blogging. There will be News. There will be a reference list of every single link mentioned in The Book.

In the meantime, I’m posting on my Amazon blog.

This past week saw a rather overwhelming but secretly sort of great gala to celebrate the launch of The Book. In the sea of revelers, one Dr. Morrison, the very cool nutritionist who advised me on the Health chapter. I asked Dr. Morrison to show me how to order a “nutrionally conscious” cocktail at an open bar, thinking the only healthy choice at the party would be a club soda.

Imagine my surprise when he handed me a vodka on the rocks. “Not champagne?” I wondered. “Too much sugar,” he advised. “But even calorically, you’re going to tell me that the healthiest cocktail is a liver-taxing highball of vodka, straight?” I was incredulous, but evidently the “rule” is to go for drinks that are “distilled rather than fermented.” Distilled over fermented. Fascinating. I equate this with the Alex Witchel Rule of Cocktails.

1. Did you vote? Are you glued to the television? Will Lieberman win in my home state? Will Alan Hevesi win despite the scandale? Does anyone love Election Day like I do? [UPDATE: My very own sister was in an exit poll in Connecticut! I'm so jealous I could spit nails.]

2. Starting today, Plan B is available over the counter without a prescription. Now we just need it to be available for minors. Baby steps, baby steps.

3. As long as we’re talking about The View, Rosie basically gave the Kentucky couple from The Amazing Race a lottery of riches so embarrassing, they looked like they were going to puke. Among the thousand things she gave to them for being “so nice”: A cruise for them and the Cho brothers; $1000 of Carhartt products for the coalminer husband who wanted to win the million bucks so he wouldn’t have to be a coalminer anymore; vacations for their kids for the next three summers; an Eddie Bauer SUV; a HOUSE to replace their trailer; confetti.

You know how you hear how people who get new homes on Extreme Makeover: Ty Pennington’s Moussed Coiffure are hated by their neighbors because they are living in a mansion amid all the humbler homes? I wonder if the Kentucky couple (who I loved too, in spite of my desperate attempts not to love a reality TV couple) is going to be able to set foot on the lot of their new house that’s been built on the site of their trailer. If I were living in a trailer next door to their new Rosie Chalet, I’d be a teensy bit disgruntled.

4. I got two giant boxes full of books today, my author copies. I signed my first book, for Bobby, the UPS delivery man. The pen exploded all over my hand.

I went to the Bad Place today in a megalithic department store’s ballgown department. It seemed like it would be fun to go try on frocks at a department store. I don’t know who I thought I was, or whose idea of “fun” I thought I was going to encounter.

I had just had a rather discomfiting doctor’s appointment and was in the mood to do something mindless and self-adorning. Oh dear god. It’s like fun, fun, fun, Jessica McClintock Gunne Sax I’m going to the prom how hilarious how fun this all is, I’m trying on a red taffeta dress oh hee heee ho ho I AM GOING TO DIE. I am sweating. I am stuck in a Zum Zum prom dress from Sixteen Candles and I’m not going to be able to get it off without ripping the zipper or pulling it off over my head, oh god I’m stuck deep inside a the Seventh Circle of Flammable Textiles, I can’t breathe, I have to get out of this dress and then I have to get out of this store. Will I live to get out of this dress? Will I make it out of this store alive? I’m thirsty, I’m dehydrated. I need to go take a shower. I need to go frolic in green space. I can’t believe I ever thought I’d find redemption via a prom dress.

Lesson learned. Again.