So it occurs to me that as we get older, our Top 5 movies of all time pretty much remain static due to a combination of continued reverence and nostalgia. And after grad school and/or a certain age, the movies that get added to this list aren’t necessarily added b/c of their merit, but b/c of your reaction to them. In other words, you’re more likely to identify with the later entries on your list. Anyway this is all to say that this weekend I added a new entry to my Top 5 list. Here’s my old list for those who are interested. . 1. The Seventh Seal 2. The Color Purple 3. 2001 4. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 5. Jerry Maguire Strangely enough, Jerry Maguire is coming off for the same reasons this new film is coming on: back in college, when I first saw this film I strongly identified with it. I felt that if I eschewed the usual paths to money, worked hard, and did things my own way, I would eventually make money doing what I want. It took Jerry Maguire about 2 years to get where he wanted to be in life, career and love. It took me 13. And now that I’m there, this film no longer seems as relevant to me, though of course, I will always appreciate its lessons. But on to my new #5. It’s Away We Go. “Away We Go?!?!” you say, scratching your head. And I say, “Yes, Away We Go.” This one has a funny backstory. About 3 months ago, my co-worker, Negative Natalie, asked me if I had seen the trailer for the film. I watched it and I said, “That makes pregnancy look awful! Why would I go...

I know that people often discover surprising stuff from their past when they’re moving out of their homes, and as it turns out, I’m no different. As I’ve stated before, I came into my relationship with CH with very little. No furniture, just two suitcases, and a few other items, all of which, fit easily into my tw0-door Echo without obscuring my rearview mirror’s reflection of what I was leaving behind as I left North Hollywood for Silver Lake. The job was so small that after giving away my mattress, I was able to pack up my studio apartment and get settled into CH’s house in under three hours by myself. I vaguely remembered putting a few things in the garage, during this move, but that was all. That is until last Wednesday when CH asked me to sort through my stuff, so that he’d know what to give and/or throw away. I wasn’t surprised about all of the papers. I am brutal about throwing away things I don’t need, but like most writers, I find it hard to let go of things I’ve written in the past, no matter how bad they are. And last Wednesday, I had no problems throwing out cards, photos, jewelry, and knick-knacks, but I kept my papers stacked in a bottom drawer and by the time I was through with my narrow plastic drawer thingie, all I had left was papers and Derby Doll memorabilia. I thought I was pretty much done. But then CH brought over the first black suitcase. I opened it to find it filled with kitchen wares, most of them an Ikea double of what we already had in our own kitchen: frying pan, pasta strainer, a couple of plates, kitchen utensils — even...

So when I was 17, I cut off all of my hair and rocked a natural until the age of 21 when I got dreads. Then I wore those for  11 years, until one day I decided I just couldn’t bear to retwist my ends even one more time and once again cut all of my hair off. The best bit of my first natural 15 years is that I didn’t have to fuss with my hair day or night. I went to bed and then when I woke up, all I had to do was run a hand through it before heading out the door. My hair never took more than 5 minutes to deal with. Now I wear my hair in a afro hybrid style called a twist out. I still don’t have to fuss with it in the morning, but if I want it to hold it’s style and luster, I’ve found it necessary to wear a scarf to bed at night. I am not happy about this. My hair looks great in the morning, but the scarf makes me look even dowdier than 8 months of pregnancy does. The head scarf look is especially unappealing on me, as I feel it makes me look less like a nubian queen and more like an antebellum field slave. However, if I don’t wear it, it takes a lot more work in the morning to make my hair look decent and my twist out doesn’t look as good for as long. So now I face the dilemma that most other women have had to decide for themselves long before now. Cute for the person who shares your bed at night or cute for the rest of the world during the day? Decisions, decisions…...

Photo by Kalimba Bennett So as you may or may not have noticed, I haven’t been talking about the writing process much lately. Many of you might have thought this was because I got sick of navel-gazing. But c’mon, I’m a neurotic writer — which means that I will never, ever stop obsessively picking at my own belly lint. I mean ever. So get that thought out of your pretty little heads. Alas, I haven’t been writing about writing lately b/c the saga of my first novel has been changing too fast to keep you up to speed til now. Here’s the recap, if you haven’t been with us up to this point — oh, and if you don’t want to go through the whole chronicle, just skip down to #4. That’s when it really gets good. 1) Around Christmas 2007 I finished the rough draft of a novel about an ugly duckling named Davie Jones who becomes obsessed with getting a Molly Ringwald Ending (a beyond perfect 80’s movie ending), even though she’s completely unpopular, the daughter of the town hooker, and extremely poor. She eventually escapes her small Mississippi town, reinvents herself as a lounge singer in Los Angeles, only to re-meet her high school crush 15 years later. I dubbed the book Molly Ringwald Ending, and I worried on my then-one-person blog that no one would like the novel that I had spent almost two years cobbling together. 2)  After months of rewriting, I emailed the book to my sister. She declared it good, so I sent it off to a fabulous book and screenplay editor named Karin Gutman, who I had met after my story was chosen for the Spark! Six-Year Anniversary Storytelling Event and inaugural CD. I approached choosing...

Photo By Timothy K. Hamilton So the last thing I ever said to my mother is, “Love you, mom.” This detail of our last conversation has brought me amazing comfort over the past 13 years, and now I try not to hang up from conversations with my family members, husband and best friend without saying some variation of “I love you” — even if I’m really mad. Mostly b/c I do love them, but also just in case. Of course, it’s not just my BFF that I love among my circle of friends, but that’s where it gets a little awkward. It’s really hard to say “Love you” when you get off the phone with your friends, b/c it makes things kind of weird. I tend to feel like I’ve surprised said friend or forced them to say “Love you, too” out of politeness, rather than real affection. I find it much easier to sign off my emails with “Love, Ernessa.” That way if any of the friends I love (God super-forbid) passes unexpectedly, then at least I’ll know that the last words I wrote to them were ones of love. It’s not quite as good as saying it maybe, but it does the trick. And I’ve been pleasantly surprised about how many of my friends have now made it a habit to sign off with love when they return my emails. How about you guys? How do you guys handle professions of love? Do you have a family members only policy? And do you, like me, find it easier to tell friends that you love them in writing rather than in person? Let us know in the...

With Earth Day coming up this Wednesday, I find myself a little confused. Maybe you are, too. I get that I’m supposed to be green and love the Earth and all of that, but one thing advocates don’t seem to be telling us in a straight-forward manner is exactly what we should be doing to show our earthly love right now. For example, I recycle all of my plastic bottles. I tried (and failed) to get a water cooler brought in at my office. When I forget to bring a tote into the store, I ask for paper, and if that’s not available, I try to make sure that I use the plastic bags that I receive for other activities. I turn off lights. I drive a hybrid. I donate monthly to an environmental lobby — even though I don’t get a tax deduction for it, I think it’s better use of my charitable giving than giving the same amount to a non-profit. So why don’t I feel like I’m doing enough? Is recycling my plastic bottles bad? Should I be carrying a water bottle everywhere I go instead? And what’s this I hear about plastic bags actually being better than paper, b/c of the it takes less energy and trees to produce a plastic bag? And speaking of trees, have you heard that soft toilet paper and tissue are bad for the environment, b/c it takes more tree power to put out a roll of soft tissue versus the scratchy, hard stuff*. Seriously, if I was married to Earth, I’d feel like she was always complaining that I don’t love her enough and that the romantic gestures I do make are all wrong. But then she doesn’t communicate to me what exactly what...

So the other day, I decided to cancel my Audible account, since I wasn’t really using it like I was back when I biked to work everyday and was going through an average of a book a week. However, I had managed to accumulate a ton of credits, so I had to pick a bunch of books before I quit for good. I went with all types of books: romance. chicklit, sci-fi, futurist thriller, action adventure and two pieces of women’s fiction. Interestingly enough, except for the women’s fiction, the novels I chose had one thing in common: they’ll all probably have happy endings. Apparently I’m not the only one that’s been skewing this way right now. According to the New York Times, book sales of escapist fare are up. Way up. And the exact same thing happened during the depression. Now I find this repeated trend fascinating, b/c people always say, “Misery loves company.” But from what I’ve been able to glean during this recession, misery effin HATES company. The laid off don’t really enjoy hearing that everybody else they know is getting laid off, too — that’s not company. That’s just depressing. And lately I’ve found myself more and more attracted to up stories about the economy. I love stories about people who have decided to pursue their dreams or start new businesses. The other day I read something about how singles have been dating with better values — i.e. women not dating men just b/c they have money and men not dating women just b/c they look good. Apparently dating according to common interest and personality is the trend in these down times. And that makes me happy. In fact, I love hearing about all of the great stuff happening to...

So last week I had an epic, epic fight with the finishing demons. Like most epic demon fights, this mostly involved me feeling too tired and overwhelmed with work and other responsibilities to write on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, or Saturday. Suddenly it was very important that I finish every script that I had been given to read, return every call, send friends long and involved emails — last Monday I got a fortune cookie that basically said that I needed to work on being a better friend. Also, another friend sent me a chain email about connecting with friends more, so I figured this was a sign from the universe to get back on the better friend bus. But now that I look back on it, I wonder if it wasn’t the procrastination demons in disguise. As I get older, I can look back on my life a little more frankly, and I realize that during the the times when I was at my most social, I got the least amount of dream work done. I’d go to my job, dates, brunches galore, attend every party I was invited too — and at the end of the day, I was still a starving artist with a crappy day job who wasn’t actually writing towards her goals. So now I’m rather boring. But I get stuff done. I miss my friends very much. But I get stuff done. I would love to have brunch with so-in-so in Santa Monica. But I get stuff done. And conveniently enough, I only feel massively guilty about not being as available as I used to be when I’m trying to finish something without a deadline. (A deadline is a writer’s best friend, but unfortunately we rarely get them on...

So I’m on what should be the last week of my 2nd novel rough draft. I started the Tri-Weekly habit in January. And a little more than 3 months later, I am nearing the first finish line, so I should be estatic, right? Wrong. As you’ve probably discovered in your own lives by now, finishing is the absolute hardest part of any long-haul endeavor. One of my favorite bits in The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield is when he talks about how the demons go buckwild whenever you’re nearing the end of a project. If you thought the naysaying voices in your head were bad before, look at how they become downright vicious when it looks like you might actually finish something. And this is especially troublesome for writers, because when they say 90% of writing is rewriting, what they really mean is 90% of writing is Finishing. When I finish this rough draft, I’ll put it in down for a month and work on something else. Then I’ll bring it back out in May and do a 2nd draft, which at 5 pages worth of rewrites a day, will take another 90 days, because I’ll have to pop out a baby in late June. I will show the 2nd draft to exactly four people: my writing exchange partner, my husband, my best friend, and my book editor. It’ll take between 6 to 8 weeks to get all of those notes back. Then I’ll do a 3rd draft, which I’ll then send off to my copy editor — another month. Then I’ll make her changes, which at 10 pages a day will take add another month and half to the process. And finally this book will be finished sometime in February 2010, not...

So I’m finding doing one thing at a time and giving that one thing my full attention to be really hard but really rewarding. I have to fight the urge to check my email when I’m on the phone or continue typing when a co-worker asks me a question or surf on my iPhone while watching TV. But I’ve also had many quality conversations with people this week, given better instruction and feedback to the people I work with, and watched less TV, b/c I actually have to pay attention to it. I actually decided to stop watching CSI: Miami last week, b/c it’s pretty much unbearable if you don’t have a computer or iPhone to distract you from the tired plotlines and their apathetic execution. However, I am running into a bit of an obstacle to paying quality attention to one thing at a time: other people, specifically multi-taskers. Last week I was in a meeting, in which the meeting leader kept stopping in the middle of sentences to answer calls and return important emails. Usually I don’t mind this. I check my own email or play on my iPhone until this person comes back to the matter at hand. But since I’m on the quality attention kick, I couldn’t help but pay a lot of attention . . . to the fact that this person was wasting a lot of my time, as well as the time of the other person in the meeting, who was dutifully sitting there, while the meeting leader answered calls and emailed to the point that the meeting literally took twice as much time as it needed to, b/c we kept on having to reset every time we were interrupted. It was infuriating. Unfortunately, I don’t think...

So, after discovering that though both of us desired kids, yet neither of us know how to change a diaper or even keep a baby alive in any way, shape or form, CH and I decided that it would probably be in our pending newborn’s best interest if we took some infant care classes. The first class was Baby CPR last Monday at this place called The Pump Station in Hollywood. Though I am eagar to keep Betty alive, I had somehow forgotten what a bad student I can be at times. Basically, I have the worst habit of falling asleep when I’m bored, which has gotten me in trouble since I was a kid. I’ve been chastised about this at my Lutheran elementary school, my public high school, my Massachusetts’ undergrad, my Chinese study abroad program (Beijing and Nanjing), and my Pittsburgh grad program — however having fallen asleep on everyone from Paul of Damascus to Mao Tse-Tung to Brecht, I can honestly say I have never been more bored than I was in Baby CPR. The problem with this class is the same one that I have with most non-fiction geared towards explaining something to you. For whatever reason, boring writers just love to say in tens of thousands of words, what could easily be explained in a few thou, and in some really extreme cases a few hundred. I call this the successful essay syndrome. Someone writes a well-received essay and gets a book deal, despite the fact that everything they needed to say was in the essay, so then they’re forced to stretch out the information into book form, when they’re really not interesting enough writers to pull off this feat. Anyway, Baby CPR was 2 1/2 hours, when it...

I found this NYT article about the privacy issues on Facebook interesting, not b/c of the Terms of Service contro, but b/c of the claim that over-30 Facebook users desire more privacy than under-30 users. In other words, younger people are used to having their lives on full display, while users over 30 are more uncomfortable with putting their personal matters on blast. This got me to thinking about privacy in general: how much of it do you need and do you feel that your right to privacy is constantly being violated? As a blogger who uses her real name, I’m obviously more comfortable with living life in a less private sphere. I had a habit of being overly forthcoming as a child — for example if my parents got into a fight, I would tell everyone that they got into a fight the next day at school. My mom managed to break me of this habit with a vague explanation of how you shouldn’t tell people everything, and for the next 10 or so years I kept my own counsel, but as soon as I was out of their house, I reverted back to that childhood habit so quickly, that looking back on it, I wonder if I was aggressively denying my natural instincts for that decade, not just dutifully following my mother’s instructions. Call me an oversharer, I just don’t see any reason not to talk about most things — especially when it comes to myself. I hate feeling stigmatized or feeling like a need to omit certain aspects of my life or personality in order to conform to society’s standards. In fact, I kind of use secrets and shame as a life barometer. If I have too many things going on...