My friend Sarah Brown has a book out.

Sarah is about cake and red shoes and old movies like, Meet Me in St. Louis and A Philadelphia Story.

Her book is about teen angst.

I feel like this should be enough to convince you to mosey on down to Borders (or other fine retailers), but if you’re one of those types that needs lots of persuasion, here’s more about the Cringe phenom and the book’s amazing contributors.  Remember Reading Rainbow, where LeVar Burton would say, “But you don’t have to take my word for it…” and then cut to kids giving mini book reports? Yeah, this is just like that. Only I’m LeVar and the kids? They are The New Yorker.

Bad ass.

Last week at my yearly physical, after the doctor finished (very kindly) harassing me about my cholesterol, I attempted to explain why the end of summer is probably not the best time for us to be assessing anything about my physical well-being. It’s summer. It’s just too damn hot to be healthy.

Summer here means it’s approximately fifteen hundred degrees too hot to do anything but slink from air conditioned house to air conditioned car. So jogging is out. Just to prove that outdoor exercise in this heat is indicative of a death wish, I tried it yesterday. And while I didn’t die, necessarily, I thought about it very hard. This, I explained, is why her fancy pants doctor’s scale says I weigh twelve pounds more than my brain scale (and driver’s license) says I do. And why my jeans require several minutes of sumo squats before I can be seen in polite company.

And what with all this freakish heat, beer has become infinitely more attractive than it is during the pleasanter three seasons. Have I ever mentioned that I hate beer? I do. It’s not my thing at all. Except in the summer when I want it all the time. Blue Moon for breakfast, Miller Lite by the pool in the afternoon and goodness me, is that a Stella? Don’t mind if I do. Turns out, beer is not all that good for you. Or your relationship with denim. Even the kind with stretch.

Then there’s the grilled hot dogs and the bratwurst. Don’t judge, but I’m pretty much powerless to the charms of some flame-kissed meat byproduct. At yesterday’s cook out, a fellow hot dog enthusiast theorized that our fascination probably has something to do with the fact that when summer comes around, you have to eat your fill because once grilling season is over, you’re out of luck. You can’t just saunter into a Burger King and order a flame broiled beef frank. So you’ve got to get while the gettin’ is good. And I do. And then I have to go home and lay on the floor and do Lamaze breathing until the hurting stops.

My doctor is the sweet, patient kind.  And after I got done with my defense high triglycerides, she just smiled.

“Oh, I’m sure that’s mostly in your genes.”

The obvious yet hilarious genes/jeans joke was so tempting (“You’re not kidding lady!”), but I figured she’d had enough for one morning. There’s only so much a person should have to put up with for a twenty dollar co-pay.

Overheard:

“My boss is seven months pregnant. A new guy just asked if she might be pregnant.”

“Might be?”

“Yeah, dude, the alternative is she swallowed a globe. My god, is there nothing too obvious for a man?”

“It’s why their genitals are on the outside… so they don’t miss them completely.”

“Damn fine call.”

P.S. It’s high time I updated my “Favorite Links” section. Because, as much as I love my friends, some of them don’t exactly write anything on their blogs anymore. Thing is, I haven’t really explored the blog world in a while. Got any recommendations?

It’s raining in my bathroom.

The man on the other end of the line chuckled. “That’s not good, is it? Let me send someone over to take care of that.”

I put down the phone and picked up a mop. It was 9:35. I’d been zonked out on the living room sofa for a good hour when the sound of water smacking linoleum roused me from my delicious Tuesday evening coma. Plop! Plop! In my sleepy haze, I misinterpreted it for the sounds of cat mischief.

“Knock it off, Hal!”

Grumbling, I yanked the thread worn chenille blanket up to my chin and prepared for coma re-entry. Five, four, three. In whoosh and the crisp snap of claws on couch, Hal’s round black face appeared over the arm of the sofa, looking foolish and eager. You rang?  I freed an arm from my blanketed cocoon to give him a lazy, grateful scratch on the chin.

Plop! Plop!

Cripes. The ruckus was decidedly not cat mischief. By the time I found the source of the plop!, there was a tire-sized puddle on the bathroom floor. I swore (the f dash-dash-dash word). At the edge of the puddle, a brand spanking new giant roll of Charmin Ultra Soft lay, displaced from the roller, disintegrated in a soggy gray heap. I swore again. Then I called maintenance, cleaned up the mess and waited.

And waited. When I got tired of wringing out the mop, I installed garbage cans to catch the water. Then I waited some more, horizontally.  Sometime after 12:30, I gave in to sleep and dreamed that my coworker had turned into a zombie and was trying to eat my work friends. Our panicked fleeing made a steady rhythm – slap! slap! slap! – mimicking the bathroom weather system. When I woke up, it was dawn. No one had come to fix the problem, which was now a lake, shored up by the soggy hallway carpet. I took in the sodden shower curtain and the trickle that had wriggled down the bathroom mirror into the cabinet, destroying the remaining five rolls of Charmin. More f dash-dash-dashes followed. Exhausted from a night of escaping the living dead, I abandoned my long-held rule about not taking out my frustrations of people in the service industry. I redialed maintenance and swore into the answering machine.

“You owe me some f-dashing toilet paper!”

Like the technologically savvy communicator that I am, I use my Facebook status updates to announce very important details about my personal life. Behold, updates from the last week:

Heather is… celebrating her nuptials to a pulled pork sammich.

Heather…just gold medaled in napping.

Heather is… unreasonably happy that the Notebook kids are back together.

Well, fine, maybe they’re not important… but what my status updates lack in meaning, they make up for in sincerity. Once, I suggested I might initiate a cage match with my officemate. I meant that every bit as much as I did the degree to which I admired my new Hannah Montana lip gloss ring (Oh yes, they do exist. Four for a dollar at Target).  I do love tater tots more than I do most people I meet. And as far as the Notebook kids go, this may be the most sincere statement I have ever made publicly. I am unreasonably happy. I will never understand why Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams pretended to break up for the last year or so in the first place because it’s obvious they are meant. to. be. and should not eff with fate like that, and seeing pictures of them reunited and snuggly made my heart swell with the kind of love that only a strange fascination with the romantic lives of complete strangers can achieve. Wuv, twu wuv.

(I told my sister it gave me elephantitis of the heart, but after a quick wikipedia lesson, I realized how truly horrifying that was and decided to go with a less graphic description. You’re welcome.)

In truth, I never realized the impact that these silly status updates could have on the internet world at large. I certainly never guessed that they would become a reason for an… intervention. But today when I logged on – initially to make a statement about the life changing experience of eating Reese’s Pieces for breakfast – I found I had a new message.

“what makes u so unhappy? I never see u say anything positive. Makes me sad for u.”

Unhappy? UNHAPPY?! I appreciate the pity and all, but come on. The Notebook kids are back together, I ate an infant’s weight delicious saucy pork, and I napped the shit out of my Saturday afternoon. I cannot imagine someone being in a state of better emotional health!

Clearly, I’m going to have to start embracing emoticons and multiple exclamation points before someone locks me in a room with hideous yellow wallpaper.