It is with heavy heart that I report that my four-legged roommate who does not pay rent hath returned. Like my prodigal son who’s been off looting and pillaging for a year, he has returned, tail not-quite-between-his-legs, to scurry and to terrify, no doubt expecting a block party in his honor. I’m sorry, Wee Mousie, but the coffres of adoration have run dry. I don’t have time for your wee charade.

I would like to be the person who couldn’t hurt a fly. I would like to never harm a living thing. I don’t think any living thing should suffer, I don’t think hunting for sport is a good idea or even really acceptable. But if a bug or rodent enters my living space, watch out—I’m a killer. In the same way that I unapologetically use Sweet ‘N’ Low even though I know it’s bad for me and Splenda is at least made from real sugar (it’s sweeter than sugar, it dissolves in iced coffee, I like it—okay, maybe I apologize a little)[Note to Self: Come up with new vice for which I am unapologetic. Other Note to Self: Other uses for Splenda], I am a ruthless exterminator. Why? Because I’m scared. Things crawling on me or near me, crapping in the cereal, infesting the cupboard—this terrifies me so deeply that I’ll go to any lengths necessary to rid my life of these invaders. If there is a spider in my apartment, I do not carefully slip a piece of shirt cardboard under its creepy crawly legs and gently release it into the wild. I squash it. I don’t feel bad afterwards—I feel relieved.

I’m sorry Wee Mousie. This is war. You can’t come sauntering back into the apartment after a year of gallivanting about town and expect a ticker tape parade.

How to Catch a Mouse in the House

I’m more afraid of bugs than I am of mice. When my first mouse arrived (oh, those were heady days), I named mine Wee Mousie and pretended I had a little terrifying pet for a week or two, before his habit of darting across the living room at the least opportune moments led me to more drastic measures.

OK, I know you hate me right now, and I hate me a little bit too, but a room-size Have-a-Heart cage trap rigged with a hunk of cheese does not fool even the dumbest mouse. Glue traps are the least humane way to trap them—they don’t kill them immediately, just stop the critter dead in its tracks and holds him captive—screaming all the while—for hours until he finally succumbs. Glue traps also catch other bugs, should you have them, which makes for a very disgusting slab of cardboard. The only way to kill a mouse effectively every time is to use the old standard spring and balsa trap. It’s fast, it kills them instantly and they really work. Lay the trap against the wall (mice truly are almost blind, so they run along the baseboards in order to find their way) near where you’ve seen the mouse. They tend to get active around dusk and and at night, so best to rig up the traps then.

To prevent more mice from entering, fill any holes (even the tiniest crack) with steel wool. Keep in mind that this may result in your trapping Wee Mousie inside your apartment, but it should keep his brethren from entering.

Now stop hating me. I am really a peaceful person. I just want you to live free of pests and pestilence.

NB: If your problem is bugs and not meese, check out my book, where uninvited guests of every stripe are addressed.

Today, totally surreal. I did a “Satellite Radio Tour,” which is sort of like a book tour except I don’t leave my apartment and I am in my pajamas and every ten minutes I’m live in a different city talking about my book, and how I came to write it and how Tyra Banks is so. not. fat. and what to do if you’re going to cry at work. Twenty times. Sometimes, often in fact, the DJ is named Tron.

Things I learned:

Regular people in Poughkeepsie aren’t excited to talk about Vassar (or, as Tracy educated me, “vassholes”).

There is a DJ in Chicago who might fixate on why you are not married if you look as swell in real life as you do in your photo.

Radio DJs have that DJ voice all over the country. In fact, there may be one DJ and he’s on every drive-time show in America. They all have that buttery baritone and they are all incredibly nice. They may all be Shadoe Stevens. Except one or two, but I think they were uncomfortable talking about girly stuff. I forgive them. In my way. Which is begrudging.

No one cares that you went to college in their state or grew up in their town. They want to get through the interview and get you off the phone for traffic and weather on the ones.

That station identification delivered in a slightly sinister voice with an echo in the background is a national phenomenon.

You can get okay with people calling the title of your book “The Girl’s Guide to Everything” even though that’s not the title (”Absolutely Everything,” my satellite friends, ABSOLUTELY). It’s like having a weird name that everyone mispronounces. You don’t want to correct people all the time so you let them call you ANN-dree-uh even though it’s on-DRAY-uh.

Getting up at 6 am and drinking a full pot of coffee may get you through the interviews but will also leave you with the delirium tremens for the rest of the day, finishing The Assignment (FINISHED!) whilst also having a self-induced panic attack.

Roasted Brussels sprouts are good in salad. (That one I learned after the satellite tour).

I have never heard the price of etiquette laid out so succintly as it was by New Acquaintance Maureen recently.

“Good manners cost nothing and pay for everything.”

Anyone know the origin? Agree/disagree?

I mean, they don’t pay for the Breville Fountain Juicer I just ordered or rent on my hovel. But you get the picture.

Previously: The Etiquette Lesson Archive

Every Sunday, an image or a movie. Earlier this week, the Very Amazing Ellie C. sent me a bunch of Minimiam images by French/Japanese duo Akiko Aida and Pierre Javelle that I’ve been dying to post. (I may be the last person on earth who hasn’t seen these — am I? Wait, don’t tell me. Oh, okay, Google confirms it.) because I find them totally irresistible. Little people with food. It’s so genius. And delightful. Hopefully this Sunday will be genius and delightful for all of us.

This week: The Horrible Manners Poll.

Everyone has etiquette offenses that drive them nuts. Is it when people talk with their mouths full? Use their cell phones in restaurants? Neglect to say thank you?

Tell me.

The Assignment comes in. The deadline is far off in the future. As the deadline approaches, I begin to think about the Assignment every day. Thoughts crystalize, ideas happen, I am at the least opportune moments digging through my giant satchel for a receipt, a pad, something on which to scrawl a line that seems to be the key to making the Assignment click, to making it not only brilliant, but fun and easy to write.

I am always always always the same girl I was in college who leaves things not to the last minute but to the minute before the last minute. I am searching for the word that refers to that moment — the moment at which successful procrastinators stop procrastinating and start working. I think this word only exists in German. A successful procrastinator spends exactly as much time avoiding the work — no more, no less — so that there is exactly enough time to get the Assignment done by the deadline. On either side of the moment, the procrastination and the work expand to fit snugly in the allotted time frame. I have an inner clock (not that clock) and it has a very quiet alarm that goes off when I must stop the avoidance techniques and start the work. I can barely hear it. Evidently it hasn’t gone off yet in this case because, well, this isn’t the Assignment.

While I am typing this I am writing the Assignment with the rest of my brain. I am also listening to Band of Horses on noise-cancelling headphones. This is a band (of horses) that I have listened to so much lately that the music is playing in my head even when it’s not (leaving no room for my default songs, thankfully). I’m not even sure I like them (Ben & I decided they’re sort of Modest Mouse meets Arcade Fire…I’d add that they sort of have a tussle with the Decemberists somewhere in there and get their hands on some acoustic guitars too). But it doesn’t matter because I can lock out the world and blast this music that I know so well (”I know you tried, I know you’re cursed, I know your best was still your worst”) it is like the music of the spheres and it seeps into the blanks between what I’m doing (writing this blog post) and what the other part of my brain is doing (writing the Assignment). There is no room for anything else. I can write without music, but I’m more panicky. I like to have loud music to shut out other possibilities, at least when I’m starting an Assignment.

My fight-or-flight writer’s reflex is a dull mechanism. It cannot distinguish between truly terrible, terrifying deadlines and mundane tasks like picking up the laundry. More to the point, a large, difficult, research-intensive assignment and a short, breezy, funny piece that I can write in my own funny-girl voice inspire the same amount of terror. No, the fact that I wrote a 500-page book (that clocked in at far more than that before severe editing), over the course of many years, does not really make me any less terrified by assignments large and small.

The problem isn’t that I don’t think I can do it. The Assignment is there and it is Everest or it is a tiny speedbump that I’ve dressed up in an Everest costume and I have been training for long enough that I know I can scale this. But there’s no guarantee that this is not the hill I will die on. I am not ever truly in control of my inspiration, my sense of humor, my most articulate self. I can create the ideal conditions (rested, caffeinated but not too, a teensy bit hungry but not starving, water close by, Band of Horses) but there’s still no guarantee. There could still be an avalanche. I could draw a blank. It’s performance anxiety.

I heard Fran Lebowitz on The Infinite Mind a year or so ago (I insist you go listen to it right now) talking about writer’s block. She has famously had writer’s block for decades (when asked once why she didn’t write another book, she said something like, “I would but I’m too busy smoking”). On the program she talked about how she has a certain low-level current of guilt running through her whenever she is not writing. Which, given her eons-long block, is all the time. I think I cried a little listening to this, because it’s so true, and — god help me — because it’s so pathetic.

I mean it. Writers are lucky. They get paid to do work that they love. The problem is — and I have heard every writer I know say this at one time or another — I sort of hate writing. In the same way I hate every single thing that I have to do for money, for a deadline, for public consumption. Does Roger Federer hate tennis? Do my photographer friends hate taking pictures? (Do you, photographer friends?) I doubt this.

So, back to the Assignment. I have no doubt it is going to be a success. I also know that I could go home right now and dye my hair and make raw pesto and watch Grey’s Anatomy and forget about the Assignment until tomorrow, when I will be in a blind panic, giving myself word counts that I must hit each hour, hating the whole thing. If I work now, tomorrow has a far better chance of being a good day. If I bail, the fight-or-flight goes into overdrive.

Because I want to have a good day, because I am very set on giving myself the ideal conditions for success, and because I keep thinking about what Gretchen says, “Do what ought to be done,” which is so simple but so right on, tonight I stay and work.

Ben & I went to see Pan’s Labyrinth last night and accidentally (or not so accidentally) missed the State of the Union address. Which begs the question.

For the record, Pan’s Labyrinth is as amazing as they say. I loved it.

All day, up and down. Absurdly so. It’s windy and each gust changes my perspective. These days I’m terrific and then I’m so ridiculously, despondently unterrific. I ask you.

Like this:

Et cetera. You see. I suppose this is a normal day. This is the sort of soaring/plummeting that normal people experience. It’s also kind of boring when recounted. I would like to be less susceptible to the tiny ripples of the universe, changing instead with the larger tides. Or maybe actually affecting the tides. I’d like to be the moon.

A few nights ago, on my way to Cusi & Peter’s for dinner, an only-in-New York moment. I was leaving the wine store, putting on my scarf to ward off the ridiculous freeze-your-organs winds and spied approaching a handsome, bespectacled fellow, zipping up his coat. In typical city-streets fashion, we traded glances.

We looked at each other just long enough for the glance to transcend “casual appraisal” and venture into “if we weren’t strangers passing in the night with no connection whatsoever, we’d be married by now” territory. After we passed, I thought to myself, “I should look back. Because I bet he’s looking back. Because we just passed through about ten dates in a single glance.” Lo and behold (which I did), he was looking back. So I turned around and walked over to chat.

I live for these moments. The odd and often gorgeous collisions of strangers are my stock in trade. I’m so constantly revising the narrative of my life while I’m living it that I think I attract spontaneous interraction. I would call it “Amelie Syndrome” but any reference to her is self-congratulatory in a “look how whimsical and adorable and devil-may-care my magic-tinged, technicolor life is” way, so I’ll just let you identify or let it go. Either way, you know what I mean.

So his name was Alex and he was indeed quite adorable and he lived in the neighborhood and I was off for dinner and so we shook hands and chatted and then parted ways which, if you think about it, was the only option. Which is to say we parted as friends, which is how I prefer relationships to end. I mean, if they have to end.

Once, years ago, a guy walked up to me at a crosswalk and said, “So, are we still on for tonight?” Delighted at the hilarity and brilliance of the gesture, I answered, “Yeah 7:00, right?” and he totally broke character and said, “Wait! Are we really going to go out at 7:00 tonight?” If I’d been free, I would have gone, but I had plans and so gave him my number to make a date for another night. When we eventually went out, he wasn’t nearly as much fun as he’d at first seemed. Come to think of it, I believe he kept trying to convince me it was a good idea for us to ride bikes together to Coney Island at midnight, which, while I’m all for the unconventional assignation, seemed a little too much of a commitment for a near-stranger.

He was actually so very much less interesting after our first encounter that I think this was the incident after which Justin diagnosed me as having “funny filter.” You know funny filter: People say normal things, like he could have said, “Are we stopped at a light? and my funny filter made me hear “Are we still on for tonight?”. Funny filter makes people far more droll and charming than they actually are.

Anyway, there’s supposed to be a story about my book in the New York Post today, the fact of which may be what’s inspired this unusually confessional, self-involved post. Forgive me.

Every Sunday, an image or a movie. This week: “Lady L” from the best show perhaps ever, “Freaks & Geeks.” God how I miss it. And so abruptly ended, but a more heartfelt love song was perhaps never composed. If anything is to make you feel dreamy and soft and nostalgic for high school, this is it. Rent the episode vault, it’s divine.

PS: Hey pick up a copy of the New York Post tomorrow. There’s some Girl’s Guide mania that’s certainly not to be missed.

Previously: Past Matinees