WanderingAmylessly 2.0

A quote from my favorite blogger, Dooce : People often write me and ask how I keep my wood floors so clean when I live with a child and a dog, and my answer is that I use a technique called Suffering From a Mental Illness.

101 ways to make a pizza. a snooty pizza, that is. Hubby and I are taking a cooking class tonight. Topic? Gourmet pizza. How many weird items we can slap onto a circle of dough, sauce and cheese? Knowing the topic, round pizza will be tres gauche and instead we'll be making trendy ovals or parallelograms of artichoke hearts, goat cheese and roasted red peppers. Wow. I'm hungry. Goat cheese never sounded so good. So, with all this Wolfgang Puck-ishness, will I be flipping dough high into the air and preparing my anchovies with flair come tomorrow a.m.? I'll let you know. Until then, bon appetit.

Maria Esther de Capovilla lived to be 116 years old -- the World's oldest woman -- before succumbing to time last Sunday. Katie Couric will become new solo anchor of the CBS Evening News on Sept. 5, and no, she has not shed 20 pounds. It seems that CBS has doctored a photo of her for promotional materials of the newscast. She says she likes the fuller-figured view of herself - "There's more of me to love." Meredith Viera will take over Couric's spot on the Today show Sept. 13. She's leaving behind cat-fight central on The View, a show described as Regis and Kelly meets ABC This Week, but looking more and more like The Jerry Springer Show in a dress. Rosie O'Donnell continues this chain of events, becoming the new moderator of The View. Can't wait for her to mix it up with sparring partner and right-wing miss priss Elisabeth Hasselbeck. Katrina, the hurricane, hit one year ago this week and is and still making lives miserable along the Gulf Coast. Suri

I am required, at my current job, to take an annual ethics refresher course. This computer-based traning module uses hypothetical scenarios to quiz employees about what is and isn't appropriate in the workplace. Intellectual property rights, conflicts of interest, insider training — they're all part of the ethical stew boiling on the burner of businesses these days. No one wants to be the next Enron. Funny thing is, the most widely reported unethical practice reported at my company last year didn't have anything to do with stock trading or stealing secrets. It was sexual harassment. Are people tired of hearing others make a lewd comment? Or are women being propositioned with threats of losing their job if they do not cooperate? I'd guess that there isn't much mysterious and puzzling about a high number of sexual harassment reports. I think that, in general, the world's filled with a bunch of perverts. We're all perverts, really. Admit it. Have you ever told

For those of you who were wondering: No. I did not get the job. I wasn't even runner-up. It's a shame. The job would've been perfect for me, and I for it. The door slammed shut. Shook my world like an 8.3 on the Richter. The good news is that there have been no signs of an impending tsunami. I will quit my job one week from tomorrow. Two weeks after that, I will officially be a freelance writer. It's a comfortable, impressive-sounding way of saying I'll be poor and unemployed. They missed out. Those people who didn't hire me, blew their chance, plain and simple. And now I've moved on.

This marks my final week of group therapy. No, I am not miraculously nut-free. I'm not getting sprung from the looney bin. In fact, I am graduating because no one else is crazy enough to keep coming week after week. Call me the lucky winner. My therapy is a 24-week program. When I began last spring, there were about 15 participants packed into a room barely bigger than my guest bathroom. As the sessions progressed, and we delved deeper into our neuroses, they started dropping like fireflies from a bug zapper. As of three weeks ago, the crowd had dwindled to two of us. She's a 21-year-old, manic, self-centered snob; I'm a 34-year-old shallow-breather under a blanket of depression. I've never missed a session, and I refuse to start now. She needs an audience to hear her talk about herself. So we're in for the duration. Because it makes little financial sense for the hospital to continue the course for three more weeks -- with two facilitators babysitting the two of us

It all seems a little less hopeless on a Friday afternoon, when a few short moments are all that stand between you and about 60 hours of freedom from corporate slavery. As the time ticks closer and closer, you can hear the words to Loverboy's "Working for the Weekend" cranking ever louder over your internal sound system. Someone rushes into your office with a frantic request for a project gone awry. Worry? Nah. We'll leave that for Monday morning. A week's worth of flipped open files and scratched-upon notepads litter your desk. Clean them up? Nah. There'll be time next week to get reorganized. What joy awaits beyond that virtual finish line of 5 p.m., another marathon work week behind you and sweet recovery ahead. Perhaps a cocktail, a run through the sprinkler with your kid, a date-night at the movies with your honey, a big hunk of ground beef grilling to perfection, poker with your buddies, online thrills with XBox Live, scratching your pooch behind her flo

What? That can't be. Say it isn't so. Yesterday, a news headline shook my world - indeed, my entire universe - to its core. The International Astronomical Union announced that after 76 years as one of the nine planets in our Solar System, it turns out that Pluto is not actually a planet. According to Wikipedia, a planet within our solar system is defined by the International Astronomical Union as a "celestial body that is in orbit around the Sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit." Somewhere along the line Pluto failed some galactical test and no longer fits that definition. While it does orbit the Sun and has that sufficient mass, it apparently doesn't fulfill the third condition: who are the celestial bodies in your neighborhood (sing along, Sesame Street fans!). It has been reclassified as a "dwarf planet

It's just a one-night-a-week-for-four-weeks course in continuing education from a local community college. The homework will be minimal. I won't receive a "grade." The instructor is as "adjunct" as adjunct can be. But I'm technically going back to school. Aah, the scent of new pink erasers and unopened mega boxes of crayons with a built-in sharpener. The smooth surface of an unopened Trapper Keeper. The potentially deadly point of a math-class compass, which finds its way onto the school supply list but is only used perhaps one class period per school year. Well, maybe my class is not that kind of school. However, this course, or at least its subject matter, could potentially change my life. A 180-degree turn. Completely flipped upside down and inside out. The course title: "Make a Living as a Freelance Writer." I have no illusions. This course will not actually -poof- turn me into a publishing phenomenon. It will, though, offer helpful hints,

And then someone does the math. I hate math. My husband says "numbers are your friend." Ok. So my numbers are evil, two-faced, backstabbing friends. The notion of starting a freelance business from scratch sounds hopeful and inspired. Building up a client list, writing something meaningful, being one's own boss, taking pride and ownership in one's work. It's all quite romantic and purposeful. Then I was shown a spreadsheet of our personal expenses for the past few months. According to those numbers, I should probably take on a second job in addition to this one I already have (and despise), just to get us in a comfortable financial position. There's no way I can afford to freelance. Nothing like that slam in the face with a cold steel sledgehammer... I wish I liked numbers. Makes sense, though, that I don't. I enjoy a good novel. I love fiction. Numbers are all too real.

Ever since I was in primary school, I knew it. The day I folded orange construction paper into halves and halves again and, within its sections, told the story of a circus clown...I knew -- with childlike expectation and ambition -- I had to pursue this passion. I had to become a writer. Nearly 30 years later, I write executives' e-mails about the latest human resources initiatives of our high-tech company. I write short summaries of our press releases for an employee newsletter. I write blurbs of community news to air on our in-house TV network. And I try not to use words like "leveraging" or "synergies." Inevitably, someone with no writing expertise whatsoever will add them in while rearranging most of the others I've written. And the end result is some bit of garbage to which I hope my name will never be attached. Where did I go wrong? For a while, a couple jobs ago, I had fun as a writer. I worked at a daily paper. I had purpose. The words meant somethin

Kids are so cute. So funny. So quirky. So inquisitive. Well, that's everyone else's kid. The thing my kid is doing would be so adorable and charming and hysterical if it were someone else's kid. My Henry? I think he's obsessive compulsive. Is there really any other way to explain... "The Checking of the Toe Fuzz" Every night. Methodically. For hours if we'd let him. He sits on the potty, completely naked, and one by one looks between each toe on each foot, in search of lint or strings or dirt or goo or whatever might have found its way in the crevices of a 2-year-old's tootsies. Ask him what he's doing and he'll mumble, "checkin' for fuzz," while straining to pull one digit away from another and peer around the fatty roll of a middle toe for a glimpse at some gray-blue fibers that must have been deposited from his favorite Elmo socks. Once he gets both feet checked, he'll check again. Wouldn't want to miss any bit of anyth

The question on everyone's mind... No, it's not, "How many more Americans have to die before we get the hell out of Iraq?" And no, it's not, "How much worse can Bush screw up our country between now and 2008? Those are critical questions. But the one people can't get enough of? Where's Tom Cruise's baby???? Born several weeks ago, at around the same time as the Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie offspring, the Tom Cruise/Katie Holmes kiddo Baby Suri has yet to be seen. Some say he's trying to build excitement around her to take it from Pitt/Jolie. Others claim she doesn't even exist, that Holmes was never really pregnant. The latest, courtesy of our friend Lesly, is that Suri has a cleft palate. What are your thoughts? Any insights? I have none. I've already spent enough time contemplating this baby. I must move on to the next shocker. Paris Hilton's going celibate. That'll really make her sex video a collector's item.