You know one of the bummer byproducts of being so busy? No time to be a hypochondriac. There’s all these diseases out there I’m not noticing or rabidly researching and it’s making me a little sad inside. I mean, I used to be a top-producing hypo. Baseless ER visits, vague “chest pains,” ALS scares. And now, I can’t even bring myself to open WebMD. There’s just not enough minutes in the day to imagine death by ingrown hair infection.

The thing is, I’ve got real stuff happening, like unexplained muscle twitching, one nostril completely closed to all oxygen inflow, and underground zits. How I’m not able to envision MS, cancerous nasal polyps, and flesh-eating bacteria instead is of some concern. Because everyone knows when you stop imagining the worst case scenario it happens.

I’m also pretty sure my apathy toward my many probably ailments is that my close friend is a hypochondriac. I’m so busy worrying about her illusory fatal events, there’s no obsession left for me. I mean I love her, but she goes to the doctor like three times a week. Eye twitching? Doctor. Sore foot? Doctor. Weird chin hair? Death by ingrown hair infection. She gives me a run for my money, she really does. I think she likes hanging out with me because I’ve had everything she
“has” and I provide some psycho-by-association comfort.

All this is to say that I can’t form thoughts to create a legible post.

Which is probably some kind of brain infarction I need to self-diagnose.

A re-post! How weird. I never do that.

I first met Mia, my most high esteemed hair stylist, when I was three months pregnant with Toots. My hair — normally a nest for rats on even the best days — was a ball of frizz and tangles. My face looked like zit pizza, and my stomach wanted to throw up all the time. I was in a bad way.

Then there was the fact that six months earlier, I followed a stripper named “Dreamy” into a karaoke bar bathroom and asked who did her hair. I politely inquired about her nose ring first, to ease into the conversation and assuage her panic about being trailed into a one-stall bathroom, but I was really just interested in her hair. It looked strippery, sure, but classy strippery.

Dreamy gave me the name of her stylist (surprisingly not located in Vegas) and it took me a good many months to finally call, which I eventually did, making an appointment with “Mia,” desperately hoping for less hideous preggo hair. The best part of the first three months of my pukey pregnancy just might be that I’d sport some stripper hair. I really didn’t have anything to lose.

I entered the salon a few days later and Mia greeted me with open arms. Why she was not stylist-to-the-strippers looking at all! She was cherubic! And young! With zero piercings and no tan! Things were looking up.

I emerged from the salon on La Jolla’s Girard Avenue an hour or two later, feeling refreshed and less like a barn mule. My nausea had subsided and I thought maybe I could reclaim my femininity, having lost it a few weeks prior in an especially robust mastication of a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia. My hair bounced, it lay flat, it did not look inviting to rodents. Mia saved the day!

All this is to say that Mia changed my outlook in those tough early days of feeling physically awful. A few good haircuts and a woman really feels rejuvenated, you know? Whatever she did to my hair, worked. I could dry it in 12 seconds and it looked bouncy and styley. Never cowlicky, never dorky, never barn horsey. I loved Mia and her magic shears.

I stayed with Mia right on through my second pregnancy, where she worked her secret wonders to impart hairstyles that did not suck. I thought I found my holy hair grail. I thought I’d been saved from the unfortunate perms of sixth grade and the “Auburn Summer of ’97″ that nearly fried my blonde hay hair clear off my dopey scalp.

Then. THEN. One day I received a voice mail from Mia. She was leaving the salon where I met her. She was going somewhere else. Somewhere close, never fear! But leaving just the same and so she carefully said the digits to the number of the new salon. I didn’t write it down or anything because planning ahead ain’t how I roll — but I kept the voice mail on my phone to refer to later.

Until I got a new phone, forgetting all about my old phone and the errant voice mails left on it.

I’d lost Mia forever.

Oh sure I called the old salon, but they never give out numbers for stylists who leave. I pretended to be UPS, Bed Bath and Beyond, the U.S. Government, some guy, and Ryan Seacrest, but each and every time, my efforts to get Mia’s new number were rebuffed. Afterward, I languished in years of bad hair. Once again, the rats came to roost. I let myself go. I wore many sweatpants.

Which brings me to Christmas Eve 2010. Wearing some amalgamation of pajamas and Garanimals, I entered my local Vons to pick up a few groceries. I didn’t bother in the least to make myself even remotely presentable. My eyeglasses were smudged, my lipstick was on my teeth, I smelled like Lil’ Smokies. I dragged my kids with me, looking beleaguered and Courtney-Love-like. I saw some cute young mom with two cute young kids in the cheese aisle and thought “whatever.” I began to scurry away from the cute mom so I looked less like Keith Richards in comparison, when a dim thought took hold in my addled brain.

That’s Mia.

That’s Mia.

Despite every inner conviction that I looked like a hobo, I approached the woman with glossy hair, unlined skin, and toned everything. “Mia?” I asked hesitantly. I mean, it’d been years. She probably wouldn’t remember me. And sure enough she looked at me like one might look at Gary Busey if he escaped from rehab.

I could tell she was hatching a cheese-aisle-escape-plan.

Then: “Yes?”

At which point I threw myself at her feet (clad in adorable flats below perfectly-fitting skinny jeans) and cried out my story.

“I’ve been looking for you since 2005 –”

“My phone –”

“Couldn’t find you and tried to --”

“I even called pretending you made American Idol and they –”

She shushed me, soothing me with promises of follicular salvation.

“Here’s my number,” she said, handing me a card. “Call me.”

I have it here someplace…

Giveaway is closed! And #20 — Dora — is the winner! I’ll email you Dora!

The other day on Facebook, Julie asked what we thought about the book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, if we’d seen the movie and how the two compare. I loved Extremely Loud, the book, a quirky and touching adventure embarked upon by nine-year-old Oskar, who lost his father on 9/11 and sets out to learn more about him. I imagined the movie wouldn’t be as good, because that’s just how it goes. The movies so seldom stand up to the stories they’re based on, in my experience anyway.

I have very few exceptions to this rule. I found Angela’s Ashes to be an apt film version and just as gritty, lushly layered and wryly humorous as the book, and the same with the Kite Runner, which made visual the often soul-rending scenes I drew in my head while reading, and finally, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 2 brought the words off the page and marched them straight into my imagination forever. I even re-read the book after I saw the movie, because I didn’t want any of what it did to my brain to end.

So for this PROMPTuesday, I’d love to know what you think. You can write this as a review or just a few lines, but: What movie adaption stood up to the awesomeness of the book version?

Post your submission in the comments OR post in your blog and leave a link to your blog in the comments.

First time to PROMPTuesday? Read a bit about it here. Want to see what’s been written in the past? Catch up on the PROMPTuesdays archive here.

Answering also enters you, should you so desire, into the drawing for a journal giveaway from Paperblanks. Pick from here or here if you win. I’d love to give you one of these to get you writing (or finishing) your own book (or God bless you, movie). This is the one I selected:

I’ll take entries through Friday for this one, and select a random winner!

Because we all have words to spill onto pages…

I can’t pinpoint when it happened, this slow eke of confidence. I turn to my husband and say, “But I want to be extraordinary!” and he tells me I’m enough and I don’t believe him.

There are words that shine and some that glower, and punch and twinkle and illuminate and waltz and float and eat your brain, and I want to write all of them. I don’t want to apologize, say “I think” or “P.S.” or “Not right now.” The spiral tightens around my fingers, a paralyzing net, and all because I’m tired and processing and pulling paragraphs out of my head like earthworms from dirt.

Was there a time I had something to say?

Did it matter?

I read a lot about going beyond or deep or elsewhere. Stretching the boundaries of how you write and what; yet I spend so much time watching how others do it that I can’t beckon my worms anymore.

It’s always been my bane: No confidence and comparison. There’s two of us: The one who writes anyway and the one who wants to be extraordinary and ties hands beyond backs.

I search for the writing I want to be, and it leads to self flagellation and bone beating and soul crushing. I can’t reach beyond, I can’t get there, I don’t have it in me.

What if that’s true?

I ask the one who writes anyway.

This was her answer.

Written through inspiration from Heather’s Just Write series.

I believe:

1. You can tell a lot about a person based on how they treat people who can’t do anything for him or her.

5. You need to keep going.

What do you believe?

Post your submission in the comments OR post in your blog and leave a link to your blog in the comments.

First time to PROMPTuesday? Read a bit about it here. Want to see what’s been written in the past? Catch up on the PROMPTuesdays archive here.

P.S. Pretty sure someone already said the writing-dark-light-switch thing. I plead brilliance by association. Or just plagiarism.

(Photo from here)

Oh boy, I’ve been busy. I know you all have too, so I’ll just quiet down now and stop the whining.

Meanwhile, please welcome my guest poster, Trish, who’s come to my rescue with some content to fill this tumbleweedy place. Trish and I have read each other’s blogs for a few years now and I’m so happy to have her here today.

Hi everyone! I’m Trish from 3 Kids and a Breakdown. I am so excited to be guest posting for Deb today. I discovered Deb a couple years ago through a mutual friend. I love reading her blog because she’s open and real and always funny. Her PrompTuesday series always inspires me. I think some of my best posts have come from there. She has been a real inspiration to me and a blogging mentor.

*******************

For so long I let opportunities pass me by. I didn’t make opportunities for myself. I didn’t go for what I wanted. I was not one of those people who pursued their dreams. Or made things happen.

I let fear get in my way. Fear of looking like an idiot. Fear of not being good enough. Fear of not being smart enough.

I really ran a number on myself. I don’t think I even realized it until very recently. I’m almost 43 years old and I didn’t understand that I was telling myself a bullshit story.

And then one day I did. I realized I was afraid. That I had been telling myself for just about as long as I could remember that I was stupid. I was lazy. A flake. A slacker. It just hit me one day that this was the story I told myself.

Sadly, I told it to others as well. And I acted out on this story. For years. And made this crap true. I was lazy. And a flake and I did slack off. But not because that was who I was. But because I was afraid.

Afraid of failing. Afraid of succeeding. Afraid of not measuring up. Just afraid.

No, it didn’t happen overnight or out of the clear blue sky. I’d been in therapy; working on myself; becoming self-aware, as they say.

So it clicked. And I decided to flip the script. Every time a negative thought entered my mind, I’d shut it down and tell myself something positive. I am smart. I am talented. I can do this. (And gosh darn it, people like me.)

And I started to believe it. Pretty quickly. And I started to look for what I wanted. To ask for what I wanted. To take what I wanted. To make opportunities happen and to seize opportunities that came my way. And magically (she says sarcastically because as I just said it took 40 years and a lot of work), things started happening for me. Things started falling into place.

I’m smart! I can write! People want to pay me to write for them. Because I do it well! I can do something not everyone can! Sure it feels good to clean the house and make a lovely dinner for my family. But let’s face it, a trained monkey could clean a toilet and a third grader could make Ina Garten’s chicken piccata. But write well? Not everyone can do that.

But I can. And I’m not afraid any more. Well, not very.

Read more Trish here.
Follow her on Twitter here.

Dull lights twinkled in the grey distance, illuminating the jagged skyline. I watched it blur by as I sped along Route 55 in my white Hyundai, heading home late from my bank job in Southside Chicago. It was 10PM and my roommates waited for me at our apartment. We were 25, and it was never too late to go out for the night. I anticipated where we’d go and who we’d meet, because there was always someone. The Cranberries’ Linger played from the crappy radio and I sang along with my broken heart. My pump heel slid on the floor mat as I pumped the brake but there was no need because the car seemed to slow on its own. I grabbed the wheel and navigated to the shoulder, and just made it. The car had stopped, just completely shut down. It was 10PM, I was alone in Southside Chicago, I was 25.

I wished I had my roommate’s car phone, that bulky box nestled between the driver and passenger seats, but as it were, there was no way to communicate with anybody. The occasional car skittered by and ignored me. For all they knew, I was just an abandoned car. Everything was dark, and I don’t remember my hazard lights working. Still, I couldn’t just sit there, I knew that much. A metal guardrail separated me from a weedy embankment that led to who knows where and I contemplated making my way down the dirt and grass and finding help.

I kept my pumps on, and wobbled through sticks and stones and surprisingly strong roots to the alley at the bottom of the hill. I couldn’t see my car above me. Once my eyes acclimated to the encompassing black, I made out the squat outline of a building giving off a blue glow. My mind bounced in that peculiar mid-point where you’re out of choices and the only thing to do is move forward even if it means danger. So that’s what I did. I rounded a corner and very briefly paused in front of a half-painted bar door. I grabbed the brass handle and pulled. A wad of gum dislodged in my palm. I entered the place and it was just as you’d think it’d be: Concrete floor, round bar stools, a buzzing Bud Lite sign, pool cues, a stocky bartender. And a pay phone. A blessed hooded and smudged pay phone standing sentry near the door.

People turned to stare. Mud caked my knees and wildness masked my eyes. I pretended not to notice and made my way to the front bar, asked for a pack of Camel Lights Unfiltered to seem bad ass (never mind the “Lights” gave me away), and took the change to the phone. I knew my ex-boyfriend’s number by heart and he lived closer to where I was now than my roommates, but I wouldn’t be one of those girls. I rang my apartment and prayed someone was home.

Lisa answered. She kept calm once she learned where I was and what I did and how I’d left the car to enter an alley bar with wild eyes and ridiculous pumps.

“Stay there until I can get to you.”

I took a quick scan of the grizzled bar patrons, and my imagination ran wild. “No. I’m going back to the car. Get me there.”

We fought briefly. She advised me not to leave alone and head back up the dark embankment to my dead car and sit there like a duck, but I blurted out the directions and hung up before she could try to save my life further.

I don’t remember leaving the bar or sitting in the car afterward or Lisa arriving, but I imagine I quickly took my exit, scrambled back up those weeds and roots and dirt, pulled the Hyundai door shut, cracked the window and lit a cigarette.

We found out later that my timing belt gave out, and that the bar I called Lisa from was geographically undesirable. I sold my car for $30. I never did call my boyfriend, but I bet he would have been worried. It would be seven more years until I’d buy a cell phone.

I probably should have just stayed in that bar.

For today’s PROMPTuesday: Write about a time when you could have really used a cell phone.

Were you somewhere you could have really used a cell? How would an experience been different if you’d been able to use instant communication?

Meanwhile, post your submission in the comments OR post in your blog and leave a link to your blog in the comments.

First time to PROMPTuesday? Read a bit about it here. Want to see what’s been written in the past? Catch up on the PROMPTuesdays archive here.

Last month I wrote about Find and Remind, a “planner” site for which I’m a “mombassador.”

As you may or may not recall, I admitted in that post that I’m a dope. With no brain cells for remembering stuff, and generally a forgetful dip.

I referenced my friend Lori, who is my hard drive and expressed concern that something might happen to her, leaving me alone to remember my own things, which will just never do.

So I joined Find and Remind to help me replace Lori.

And it’s been going fairly well, with me signing up my daughters’ kindergarten and second grade classes to eliminate the constant back and forth emails the teachers send with the yada yada responses the parents send. I also signed up Toots’ Brownie troop, and added a fancy scheduling option allowing people to sign up for Girl Scout cookie sales. With all these groups I created, I entered important dates on the calendar and posted group messages that allow everyone to see replies in one place, instead of shuffling through email after email.

As I once mentioned, Find and Remind is a lot like a friendlier Google Group geared toward parents to help communicate with specified group members, schedule playdates, carpools, school events, and so on.

Well the thing is, due to my general dopiness, I forgot to keep entering stuff. And I thought I’d have to email Find and Remind and tell them I just can’t seem to get it together and I’m sorry you once liked me.

But then! I discovered the thing that I CAN do: Schedule my book club.

Look, I know this post is all over the place, but I felt it’s important for me to illustrate my overall state of mind and freneticism so you can truly appreciate the road I’ve traveled to getting it somewhat together.

See, my book club is my heart. I love it with undue passion. But lately? It’s been falling apart. There are six of us and we have our schedules and our traveling across the country in RVs and our probably-going-to-get-married-soons. Also, I haven’t been reading the books, a minor detail I will gloss over with who, me? aplomb. Still, we continue to make plans to meet, only to have them fall apart with a disconcerting crash. Most recently we were to meet last night to discuss “Atlas Shrugged” and only two people could make it so we had to cancel.

So what I did see is put everybody on Find and Remind so I could send group messages from there, list our books, use the calendar, and kick some butts. And you know what else I did? I just pulled a March meeting date out of my addled brain and stuck it on the schedule and wrote “THIS IS THE DAY WE ARE MEETING.”

I have yet to hear back, but I’m assuming everyone loves my taking the club by the horns and pulling us up by the bootstraps.

So the point is that even I can plan things, and sometimes it might take a bit of time to find my planning mojo and it might not be for Brownies or classes or life overall, but when it comes to books? I will make it work.

As a value-add to this post, I thought I’d list some of the books my club has read and enjoyed:

1. The Cellist of Sarajevo (Poetic, haunting, lyrical)

2. Suite Francaise (Amazing work given it was supposed to be a rough draft and discovered years later after the author passed away at Auschwitz.)

3. The Book Thief (I reference this one a lot, I adore it. It’s deeply affecting.)

4. The Snow Leopard (Nature non-fiction that reads partly like an adventure tale, partly like a soap opera. Although the author seemed majorly self-involved, he wrote beautifully about his quest to find the Himalayan snow leopard.)

5. Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before (Such a fascinating look at the impact Captain Cook had on so many regions.)

6. A Reliable Wife (Part human story, part mystery, all eminently readable.)

Leave any book suggestions below for my book club and I! I’ll add the titles to Find and Remind and make my group read them! Because of that horns-and-bootstraps thing I said above that makes no sense.