My Life and Thoughts

Today marks the first solo book release by my colleague Lauren Mechling—you know, the one who was delivered by the same obstetrician as me.  It hasn’t been out for 24 hours yet and already Dream Girl is challenging my poor battered gender stereotypes (I think they’re part of my decrepit worldview).  So remember the relatively recent post when I was like, “Oh, girls would be embarrassed to talk about the gross things they eat made out of peanut butter?”  Well, I was really wrong, because check out this excerpt from the “Lauren Mechling extravaganza” on the blog YA New York, in which Lauren and the author of said blog, Sabrina Banes, take turns asking each other twenty questions:

Question Sixteen

LM: What’s the embarrassing thing you regularly eat by your lonesome? It has to be something that no sane human would ever serve in a restaurant.
YA NY: Oh my God. You’re really trying to torture me, aren’t you, asking questions like these? Okay, here’s the thing I eat when I’m sick: Peanut butter rice soup. Basically, you take leftover rice (the kind used in making sushi, which is short-grained and what Koreans eat on a daily basis) and you cover it with water and let it boil. Add two tablespoons of peanut butter, and simmer until you get a weird brown porridge. It’s like chicken soup for the crazy half-Korean girl.

Question Seventeen

YA NY: Fine, Ms. Lauren. What embarrassing food do YOU eat on your lonesome?
LM: Oh, I was hoping you’d ask! I like instant couscous, boiling hot water, worsterschire sauce, a pat of butter, and a sprinkle of salt.

I mean, true, confessing these “recipes” is described as “embarrassing,” “torture,” etc… but if the discussants were really embarrassed, they could always have said “ice cream sundaes.”  In short: if you can figure out gender stereotypes, dear reader, may they bring you much happiness; personally, I give up. 

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Inspired by the example of a certain pobrecito anónimo, I’m writing my third blog entry in as many days!  This is about my latest adventure as a D-list writer. OK so a couple of months ago I was contacted by a very dear friend—an A-list writer of YA fiction, and an editor at the weekend edition of a well-known American newspaper—who asked if I might like to write something about my escapades in grad school, for a series of 2000-word “fun” pieces by “serious” writers, including, but not limited to, “Mamet on buying a house.”  Naturally this appealed to my spirit of challenge: as if I couldn’t make my experience in grad school sound at least as fun as David Mamet’s experience buying a house!  “You’re on, Mamet!” I thought, hitting the Send button.

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I was recently delighted to learn that my dear friend, the teen fiction sensation Lauren Mechling, now has a blog where you can read about her pursuit of flawless social functioning, and also about the time she spilled a cup of coffee on famous actor Jeffrey Tambor and didn’t feel bad about it. After spending an enjoyable half hour poking around Mechling’s website, I made an amazing discovery about our shared past. “My mother,” Mechling writes,

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