Welcome!

For people who have never been to Laura’s website, hello and thanks so much for visiting! [ADDITIONAL GUSHING DELETED.] If you’re a little confused by Laura’s brant and want to know more about her before jumping, feet first, into her bragging and ranting and sharing her every thought and feeling area, please start at the new section for Laura Zigman beginners called “WHO’S LAURA?” Then, once you’ve gotten the basics and feel somewhat fluent in brantese, please come back here and look around and stay a while!

A friend just mentioned being confused about where to find Laura’s Brant: the new location of HearMeBrant is www.laurazigman.wordpress.com. Come visit!

Due to an extended period of technical difficulties, Laura has decided to move her Brant to another address.  Click on this link to follow her to her new Brant-home: http://laurasbrant.blogspot.com/ — there you’ll find new posts, new photos and visuals, and lots of self-deprecating stories about Laura’s daily life — in other words, all the exciting features you’ve come to expect from Laura’s Brant.  Laura set up the new Brant all by herself and even tried to carry over a similar look and color scheme!  So don’t let all her time and effort go to waste!  Come visit!

Laura knows she’s going to run the risk of sounding gratuitously self-deprecating with this post but she’s going to do it anyway: several things lately have prompted her to feel Less-Than and she feels compelled to chronicle and share the events in question and let her Brant readers in on the challenges of her daily life.

A few weeks ago, Laura got an email from one of the uber-parents at Ben’s new school.  Briefly, because Laura feels strange writing too much about Ben — his life is his own, and private, and shouldn’t be used as Brant-fodder, no matter how desperate Laura is for material! — Ben is at a new school now, a Montessori school about 8 miles away that is turning out to be a great place for reasons Laura won’t elaborate on because Ben’s life is his own, and private, and shouldn’t be used as Brant-fodder, no matter how desperate Laura is for material! Anyway, this uber-parent emailed to see if Laura would be willing to co-chair an event a few weeks away — an outdoor fall-related day with crafts and pumpkins and apples and relay races.  It wouldn’t be that bad, the uber-parent assured her in the email — all she would have to do — and all the other co-chair would have to do — would be to figure out all of the activities, assign “volunteers” to run them, and then make sure everyone was doing what they were supposed to be doing.

Laura stared at the email and froze. She’d spent her life as a parent avoiding exactly this kind of thing — outdoor fall-related days with crafts and pumpkins and apples and relay races — because, quite frankly, Laura sucked at all of those things (except for apples) and more than sucking at those things she sucked at organizing and planning things.  Laura could barely organize and plan a morning of paperwork and errands, let alone outdoor activities for a school full of kids and parents she didn’t yet know who would forgive her her ineptitude.

Laura, always desperate for people to like her, or, at least, to not hate her, agreed instantly.  More than wanting to be liked, though, what she wanted was to make it clear, to herself and to Ben and to the parent organization at the new school, that she was willing to be involved, and engaged, and helpful.  She’d spent the last few years at Ben’s previous school volunteering for nothing (it was a tough few years) (in addition to her tendency to not get involved being in full bloom) and she felt guilty about it.  Not for the reason she thought she did — for making other people do the work and never helping with it and for being ungenerous with the little free time she had — but because there was something isolating and slightly sad about having failed to become a part of the school community.  And because of that she was determined to start fresh and do things differently.

So she shot back an enthusiastic but secretly-terrified email quickly — “Count me in!” — and instantly panicked, even though she was up-front and honest in the email about her lack of experience in the parent-volunteering department.  I have no leadership skills and know nothing about crafts! she was sure to inform them all, to slightly paraphrase, but I hope my willingness to be told what to do and be bossed around will overshadow my lack of ability!  Ha ha ha.  And then she sat by the computer hoping for a response that would let her off the hook.  The Well, actually, so-and-so’s-mom is a real crackerjack and co-chaired last year and I’m sure she’d be willing to run the show one more year kind of email.  But unfortunately it didn’t come.  All that came was a cheerful and grateful email thanking Laura for her quick response and her willingness to jump in and roll up her sleeves.

(OK, so she made up the part about the rolling up of the sleeves but you get the idea.)

And so, Laura showed up to the two coffee meetings at the Starbucks a few miles to the school — showed up with her legal pad and her Sharpies and her class list and her folder — showed up with a suppressed feeling of dread and fear that she was not up to the task — feeling like a complete fraud but determined not to give in to her knee-jerk desire to disappear.  Laura had never been a lot of things but one of the things she’d never been the most was a joiner.  And suddenly there she was, “joining” a group of very nice and very smart and very capable women in order to plan a “simple” day of fun of games.

With anxiety-induced flop-sweat (or maybe it was just her age-appropriate hot flashes) she did what she used to do in marketing meetings  at her old job in New York book publishing — take copious notes instead of saying anything because she never really had anything to say.  Over a decade out of the corporate world, Laura was up to her old tricks — nodding and writing and repeating things that had just been said and trying her best to fit in — but it was hard.  Laura had come unprepared — she hadn’t come with crafts in mind for one or two of the tables — and so she readily agreed to suggestions provided by the others:  a table where kids would decorate card-stock paper with leaves and other detritus collected from the natural surroundings (known in the kid’s crafts industry as “Leaf Plaques”), and face-painting (known as “Face-Painting”). In addition, she agreed to help her co-chair — an incredibly organized and dedicated and creative mom — with various duties that included emailing, volunteer-pimping, buying crafts supplies, and transporting 125 pumpkins from a nearby farm to the school in one of her Volvos.

As is so often the case with Laura’s difficult and trying life-moments, things got worse before they got better. Because the time eventually came when she had to go to a crafts store and buy her supplies. But before she could buy supplies, she had to research what she needed. And that took Laura almost 6 hours — searching the web, visiting Martha Stewart’s website, looking for great Halloween crafts that might be better than the Leaf Plaque craft she’d agreed to — before she finally gave up and decided to just go and buy some stupid fucking paper for the plaques and some face paint already. So off she went to the local Michael’s crafts store — and to CVS — AND to AC Moore — all of which were piled high with Halloween, if you’ll pardon the word, crap — and all of which presented Laura with her toughest scenario: deciding on what to buy when confronted with a dizzying array of choices. Nowhere is this problem more obvious than when she goes to Staples on a simple errand — to buy, say, file cards. She’ll get to the file card aisle, then stare wide-eyed and slack-jawed at the endless row of file cards — big ones, small ones, white ones, colored ones, lined ones, unlined ones, day-glo colored ones, pastel colored ones – the possibilities go on and on and on and on — for so long, in fact, that Laura often leaves without buying anything: no file cards, no legal pads, printer paper, no notebooks, no Sharpies.

Which is what happened when she got to Michael’s — not knowing what kind of “plaque” paper to buy, or how much, or what color, or what size, she ended up buying close to $40 worth of card stock — plain white, a variety of parchment colors, bright colors, pastel colors; 8×10, 3×5, 5×7 — and buying about $35 worth of face paint kits at CVS — tubes, brushes, palettes, face crayons — all of which went into the back of her car until The Big Day. The Big Day that finally came last Sunday and that went off, despite Laura’s indecision and overbuying and ineptitude and anxiety and insecurity — without a hitch. People came, they wandered, they stared, their children sat down and glued leaves onto variously colored and variously sized pieces of card stock; they sat down and had their faces painted by a few artistically-abled parents; they decorated pumpkins and they tasted and went on hayrides. And as Laura tried to keep the card stock and the leaves and the glue cups from blowing away in the blusterly wind on that Sunday October morning, she realized that she’d learned one thing that she hadn’t expected to learn:

She liked being involved.

So what if it meant she’d have to spend the rest of the week running around returning all the extra paper and face paint?

Laura didn’t intend to take a five day break in between Part I and Part II of The Lice Story, but hey, that’s what happened and she is, as always, very sorry about the lapse. She wishes she had a whole long list of interesting things she did which caused the lapse but again, as usual, she has nothing much to report. Laura’s been working, working, working toward her September 1st deadline and she’s really making progress.

But back to the lice.

So after Laura spent 9 hours combing the bugs and the nits out of Ben’s hair and piling up several hundred dollars worth of swearing, she realized that if there was even one single nit in his hair come Monday morning, the camp nurse would send him home, and their expensive second session of camp would be wasted. The other thing that would be wasted would be the working-time his expensive second session of camp was buying Laura, and so when her sister-in-law Colleen called and Laura told her about her predicament, Colleen sprang into action.

You need to call a professional, Colleen said, after whipping her into a frenzy of how-impossible-it-was-going-to be-to-get-rid-of-their-lice-problem-herself. Colleen was a big believer in calling professionals, and Laura had to admit, when she started to think of the lose-lose scenario — doing it herself, missing a nit, having Ben sent home from camp, getting nothing done that week, missing her deadline, losing the house, moving into an apartment in a shitty neighborhood, having their cars repossessed and defaulting on their credit cards — Laura could go on and on and on since she has the equivalent of a graduate degree in negative catastrophe thinking — she began to see Colleen’s point:

Laura’s entire future was hanging in the balance. She had to call in a professional.

Laura had told Colleen on the phone that several years ago one of her blog-mom friends had suffered a terrible bout of lice at the middle school her son went to — she and her three kids have huge Jewish hair — sometimes referred to as “Jew-Fros” — and after several attempts at delousing, the lice were still there. Which is when she called someone named Helen The Nitpicker.

Laura had thought she was kidding way back when — in fact, she remembers chuckling at the thought of a professional nitpicker — but Lisa was very serious: there was a women in Boston who was a professional nitpicker and she and her service had been written up in various papers in Boston over the years. Lisa said she cost a fortune but she was worth it, since without her she knew they’d never get rid of the lice and her kids would never be let back into school. Laura also remembered thinking what a JAP she thought Lisa was — calling in a professional nitpicker!!

But once Laura called Lisa and got Helen the Nitpicker’s number, she couldn’t leave a message for her fast enough.

Unfortunately, Helen The Nitpicker wasn’t calling back, though Colleen was, and when Laura told her by noon that Saturday that she still didn’t have a professional coming, Colleen took matters into her own hands and found a lice removal service that would come to Laura’s house that afternoon. The company — Lice Treatment Center — was based in tony Fairfield, Connecticut and boasted that it was started by two high-powered women (one a Harvard educated pediatrician, the other a former Manhattan real estate agent with a bunch of kids) and that they used only all-natural non-chemical products they’d formulated themselves (with ingredients like the natural lice-killer tea-tree oil). So after a quick conversation with Liz — the co-owner in Connecticut — Laura was told that Stephanie, their Boston-based person, would come to her house later that afternoon. All Laura had to do was pick this Stephanie up at the nearby T-stop when she arrived.

Laura was relieved, and as excited as she could possibly be at the prospect of spending a bloody fortune for someone to check Ben’s head, and her own, and Brendan’s — it was, of course, one of the only beautiful Saturday afternoons of the entire summer, with the sky bright blue and the air cool and devoid of humidity — and so when the call came from Stephanie that she was almost there, Laura jumped in the car and drove over to the T stop. Sitting there in her car, looking out the window and watching the Green-Line train pull down the tracks and stop and all the handful of passengers slowly file out, Laura squinted into mid-day sunshine for someone who looked like a nitpicker:

Someone old and dumpy and serious looking.

Because, if you’re like Laura, you’re assuming: nitpicker: unattractive. Or, nitpicker: homely and middle-aged. You’re not expecting NITPICKER: 5′8″ GORGEOUS CURVACEOUS BUXOM 24-YEAR-OLD BRUNETTE WHO’S ACTUALLY REALLY INTELLIGENT AND REALLY NICE.

But that’s what Stephanie The Nitpicker was. 5′8″ gorgeous, curvaceous, buxom, 24-year-old brunette who was really intelligent and really nice.

I mean, Laura asks you: What are the chances?? Seriously! What are the chances?!?

Of course, in typical men-have-it-easier fashion, Brendan’s head was fine. And let’s just say that when Stephanie pronounced Brendan to be nit-free, he was clearly disappointed.

And so, despite the fact that Laura could have bought like 3 iPods, 2 iPhones, and dinner for 12 at The Palm for what she spent on six hours of professional lice removal, she’s glad that she had piece of mind that quickly: by the time Stephanie was finished after eight that Saturday night, and after Laura and Ben drove her home to Cambridge and then had dinner at Ben’s favorite restaurant — Bertucci’s – with their respective now-lice-free heads full of a proprietary mixture of tea tree oil and olive oil and God knows what other all-natural ingredients — they returned home knowing — or feeling almost very certain — that they were completely and utterly lice free.

And who needs iPods and iPhones and fancy dinners when you have piece of mind like that?

In the “What are the chances?” department, Laura has an epic entry, and an incredibly unlikely one (which will be clear at the end of the story).

Two weeks ago, Ben was sent home from his fancy pants summer camp because, well, since there’s no easy way to say this, Laura will just go ahead and blurt it out:

He had lice.

Laura, completely under the gun with her work deadline (September 1 for those of you who can’t remember the small but deeply important details of Laura’s life), raced to Brookline to pick up Ben, who was in what looked like a holding cell in the “health” office which is in the basement of the private school’s main building. Anyone who has heard the whole thing about how you shouldn’t feel ashamed about your child having lice — that it’s not a sign of an unclean child or any fault of their grooming — that, in effect, just like shit, lice happens – can go ahead and move that to the “Farces in Life” column, because walking into that health office Laura definitely felt the weight of judgment from the two nurses who lead her to Ben. It seriously looked like one of those interrogation rooms in “Law and Order” — gray, with a gray metal desk — or maybe it was a pink room with a green table, Laura can’t remember — all she can remember is the weight of judgment and the feeling of shame that crept over her as the nurses — two of them — showed Laura the live bugs in Ben’s hair with a wooden tongue depressor.

Yes, you read that correctly: live bugs.

Laura had, of course, noticed that Ben had been scratching his head lately — in fact, not knowing exactly what to look for, she had, on two occasions around that time, looked through his head, once with a high-intensity light and another time with a magnifying glass, and had seen nothing. She tried to explain this to the two nurses — how there’s no way she would have missed the live bugs in his hair, they must have just hatched — but there weren’t’ buying any of it. Oh, yes, right, they must have thought. They just hatched.

Laura knew she’d be able to get a handle on those little bugs, but when they showed her with a judgmental flick of the tongue depressor, a nit — well, she just about lost it. Because she simply couldn’t believe how small the fucking thing was and how many of them were in his hair.

Maybe it’s because Ben has really long hair — recently trimmed, as a matter of fact! — kind of a British-rocker cut (that’s another long story about the really annoying woman who cut his hair) — that the nurses gave her such a disapproving look — you know, like, Maybe if he didn’t have so much hair he wouldn’t have lice — that kind of look — but whatever the reason, Laura put Ben in the car, and drove straight to CVS where she picked up a laundry list of items her pediatrician’s office was dictating to her over her cell phone….Nix Lice Killing Shampoo, metal nit combs (not plastic), Herbal Essence “Degunkifying” Shampoo, shower caps, olive oil….

Olive oil? Yes. Because after washing his hair with the lice killing shampoo, and after combing out the nits with the metal comb, Laura was instructed to cover Ben’s hair with olive oil and then cover his hair with a plastic shower cap and make him sleep with his oily covered head until the next day when she could, with the “Degunkifying” shampoo, wash it out. The olive oil, her pediatrician’s nurse explained, would kill the bugs by suffocating them (aided by the flourish of the shower cap).

Not only was she to do this that night — she was supposed to repeat the olive-oil-and-shower-cap-treatment about 8 times in the coming weeks — all in an effort, apparently, to “interrupt the hatching cycle” of the lice.

Laura called Brendan from the car and ordered him — in a tone that was rude and nasty and imperious and full of the weight of human hygiene — she was just in a really really bad mood by now — to start washing Ben’s bedding and clothes, and their bedding and clothes, and that whatever he couldn’t wash in the hottest water he should shove in the dryer for 20 minutes and dry on the hottest setting — the heat would kill the bugs. Brendan agreed to get started, but Laura could just tell that he wasn’t getting the enormity of the situation because he sounded too fucking calm on the phone. What is it with men? she couldn’t help thinking as she sped home with her car full of lice-killing supplies. They. Just. Don’t. Get. It. Ever.

Back home, Brendan was indeed in the midst of a major laundry project, so Laura spread out the supplies and dragged Ben’s big head of hair over to the sink. She washed his hair with the Nix, then had him sit on the kitchen stool by the sink so that she could start combing through his head with the metal comb, and once they got underway, Laura was struck by two things:

1) How many little tiny black bugs she was finding in Ben’s hair and

2) How fucking long it was taking to get through one small section of his hair

The other thing that was starting to occur to her was that getting the bugs out of his hair was the easy part. The truly hard part was trying to get the little teeny weeny white things out — since they are stuck, in a brilliant example of evolutionary-survival mode, to the hair with a kind of lice-glue. The more Laura tried to find the white things — and then remove them — the more frustrated she became.

And the more frustrated she became, the more she started to swear.

There’s a rule in Laura’s house — that Ben gets a dollar every time she or Brendan says a “bad word” — and let’s just say Ben was cleaning up that afternoon by the sink and probably earned enough money for a Wii, a Playstation3, an XBox 360, and about a thousand games. The “s” word was flying, the “f” word was flying, and all the while Brendan tended to the laundry in a manner that was, to Laura, suspiciously devoid of extreme anxiety and that could even be described as calm.

Combing and swearing and combing and swearing for hours — literally hours — and finally taking the project upstairs to the bedroom, so that Ben could watch TV while she combed — the lice event stretched on into the evening. Ben couldn’t have been a better sport about the whole thing, and only began to dissolve — although mildly — when he realized he was going to have to wear the plastic shower cap for the rest of the day and overnight.

9. Laura Went Gluten-Free
Don’t ask her to explain exactly and scientifically and bio-chemically and bio-engineeringly why Ed Schaeffer, her fantastic physical therapist slash spiritual guru told her to do this but she finally did, about two months ago, and except for cheating here and there, she’s been really trying to be almost entirely gluten free as much as possible. You’ll nice there are a few mitigating words and phrases there — like almost and trying and except for and as much as possible — and Ed’s wife Liza, who is in charge of the book group Laura belongs to (and only sometimes reads the books for), would say that being “sort of gluten-free” is like being “a little bit pregnant” — in other words, it’s ridiculous — but Laura is still proud of her efforts to curtail her intake of gluten, for whatever reasons she’s supposed to do it. The only positive effects she’s noticed — and not to venture off into dreaded TMI [too much information] territory — is an improvement in her digestion, if you will, and that’s the reason she’s going to continue at least trying to be as gluten-free as she possibly can. As for why this constitutes a valid partial excuse for her lapse in blogging, you try tracking down gluten free waffles and bread and oatmeal and a bunch of other “safe foods” at Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s and on various gluten free — known in the trade as “GF” — websites. It takes hours.

10. Laura developed what she thought were the painful beginnings of lymphedema arm.

Back in June, when Laura was supposed to drive to Buffalo, her arm — the one under which the nodes were removed during her surgery way back when — started to kill. It hurt, ached, and was tender to the touch, and Laura actually had to postpone her trip by a day or so in order to squeeze in an appointment with the aforementioned Ed Schaeffer to get her arm at least semi-painless. No offense to Ed, but the pain and enormous discomfort came back, no matter how much she elevated it during the middle of the day and how many pillows she shoved underneath it before she went to bed — it still hurt like a mother-effer. Finally, at some point, when she was browsing through the website she’s supposed to be regularly blogging for — the Health Central Network site www.mybreastcancernetwork.com — she realized, Hey! Maybe I have lymphedema arm!!

Accessing her deep need to self-diagnose, Laura immediately hit the site with ferocious curiosity and then began hitting other sites, all in an effort to figure out whether or not she had the beginning symptoms of lymphedema arm. In fact, she emailed one of her fellow expert bloggers and new online friend, writer extraordinnaire and breast cancer survivor PJ Hamel, with her questions — including whether or not she needed a compression sleeve-type arm garment — who told her swiftly and without hesitation to get herself to a physical therapy practice that specialized in lymphedema prevention and treatment ASAP. So Laura did. And after her first two sessions with someone named Linda, her arm has been miraculously pain free.

11. Laura got a new color printer to print out the new book.

This might seem like a throw-away excuse — I mean, because, like, how long does it take to get a printer and plug it in — but you’d be surprised at how much time it took Laura to figure out what kind of printer she should get. It’s not like she can’t make a move without consulting Consumer Reports — in fact, she’s too cheap to get an online-subscription because for some reason she thinks it should be free to browse their archives — but it still takes time to poke around online, looking for a color printer that isn’t too big or too huge or too expensive or too-office-like. Then, once you decide on what you’re going to get, you have to order it, or go to the store — like, Staples –and then you have to shlep it to your car, shlep it inside the house, in Laura’s case, shlep it up to the fucking third floor where her desk is and which is accessed by this weird set of StairMaster-type stairs — and then of course you have to take it out of the box and set it up. This required knives and scissors and bubble wrap and wrestling Ben OUT of the big printer box once it was empty and figuring out how to get the ink cartridges flowing and all the computers networked with the new printer without fucking up the network with the old printer. Easier said than done. Laura thus feels no guilt whatsoever about including this as an excuse for not branting for so long.

12. Laura actually got a paycheck and had to make a deposit.

This was really big news — Laura got paid! – an on-signing payment for the Patti Novak project — so she had to take time out of her busy busy month to open yet another new business account at her local Bank of America branch since her other two business accounts had been closed over the years due to inactivity. Laura was, to be frank, and to use Boston vernacular, wicked pissed when she arrived at the bank with her check and her deposit slip only to find out that yes, once again, her two-year-old business account was closed and she was going to have to waste another hour and a half opening another one. You see, when you have a business account you have to prove that you’re a business — even if you don’t earn any money for years at a time like Laura’s business — and that means you have to show the bank your Articles of Incorporation. Luckily they had those articles of incorporation on file electronically so it only took an hour and fifteen minutes to get the account open. But as you can see it took a lot of time and energy to deposit that check so it’s yet another valid excuse to add to the list.

Laura’s just going to jump right in and start branting — if she stopped to think about how long it’s been since the last time she posted anything — she thinks it was sometime back in April (that would make it, uhm, over 3 months and close to 4 months) — she would be overwhelmed by the lapse and probably not be able to write anything. Because the lapse would make her wonder what happened to her will to brant; what happened to her desire to share her life with the few friends who read her brant and with the thousands upon thousands of por-n-ographic spammers who troll her site; what happened to her the sense of fun in complaining and ranting about the absurd moments of every day life.

Laura can’t believe one of the last posts she wrote was about her Dansko clogs — the ones that made her fall on her face — and it all seems so long ago. Where did the months go? And why why why did she stop branting? What follows is her impromptu attempt to deconstruct her reasons for being so silent for so long.

1. Laura’s brant developed incurable inoperable technical difficulties.
One main reason Laura can point to that made her lose her will to brant is the fact that something happened to the Wordpress blogging system (which hosts her brant [whatever that means]) that made it impossible for her to post photos. For some reason, being able to illustrate her brant with pictures — be they photographs or other kinds of visual aids — was very important to Laura — and when it was clear that neither she nor her genius web guy could figure out why this was happening and, more importantly, how to fix it, a little teeny part of her died. It’s actually really hard right now knowing that this brant is going to be all text and no visuals, but she’s forcing herself to not think about that and to just push forward and finish her post.

2. Laura had to go on a bunch of trips.

Though it seems and feels like forever ago, back at the end of May Laura and Ben and Laura’s parents flew out to LA together for Laura’s niece’s bat mitzvah. The few people who read Dating Big Bird — you know, the people Laura paid to do so (ha ha) — would understand that “The Pickle” — the character in the book who was loosely based (okay, like, entirely based) on her little niece exactly ten years ago — is the same niece who is now 13. Laura could write an entire screed on the cliche that time flies and how old she feels but instead she’s probably going to eventually post a description of what it was like for her to fly with her parents and her 8-year-old son — balancing the needs of the old (pre-boarding, luggage lifting and carrying, a constant awareness of sodium grams and sugar counts and cholesterol postings on all possible snacks) with the needs of the young (PSP, DVD, snacks, snacks, snacks). There’s a mathematical equation buried in there — something about the needs of the old + the needs of the young divided by HER NEEDS = Wait! She Doesn’t Get To Have Any Needs! but that would sound worse than it actually was and Laura wouldn’t want to sacrifice the good feeling of the trip for a cheap joke on her brant. Look forward to a posting — hopefully, assuming Laura doesn’t forget to brant until sometime in December — about the trip back from LA, which, in typical Laura travel-fashion, included a 45-minute security check (she was carrying her parents bag of shoes, all the bottoms of which seemed to test positive for some kind of plastic explosive-type of substance!!); the plane getting pulled back after taxiing out to the runway due to mechanical difficulties – Laura’s favorite extreme anxiety-producing problem!! – her missing Xanax (oops! she packed it! and not in her carry on!!); Ben’s misery at having to leave his cousins and his aunt, Laura’s sister (who Laura suspects Ben likes more than her!!); and the violent thunderstorms that had to be avoided all the way across the country during their more than 8 hour delay (why did the pilot have to mention their extreme altitude of 44,000 feet and the fact that they were going to have to fly all the way up to northern Wyoming and Minnesota to avoid those storms??).

Besides LA, Laura had to go to New York after that — for a meeting with Ballantine for the Patti Novak book she’s writing. It was a day trip — up and back with no overnight — and she took the Amtrak Acela for the first time. And probably the last. Since it’s so ridiculously expensive (Laura usually drives or takes the Limoliner Bus). The only good thing was that on the way back she met this amazing woman who lives in Boston and who, strangely and oddly enough, was just about to have surgery for a type of breast cancer similar to Laura’s.

And then after that, she went to Buffalo to see Patti and work some more on the book which is always fun since she — Laura — gets to watch this hilarious unassuming genius — Patti — go about her day and do her usual thing — interviewing potential single-clients in order to match them with her other clients — while she — Laura — takes notes, lots and lots and lots of notes. Of course, yet again in typical Laura travel-fashion, her drive from Boston to Buffalo was on the direct path of a severe thunderstorm and tornado watch — all the way from Western Massachusetts to Patti’s house. In fact, Laura had to stop several times when she saw the sky darken and the clouds rolling in overhead — pulling into various rest stops along the highway, as if sitting in a McDonalds on the New York State Thruway during a tornado was the safest place to be during a tornado — and all her stops made her about 3 hours late to Buffalo.

3. Laura got a Blackberry.

Laura’s pretty sure most of the people who know her know that she hates the phone. Maybe it’s because of all the years of being a publicist when the phone was a constant source of stress and misery which caused a Pavlovian response in her to develop over time where when she hears a phone ring she instantly shuts down and is emotionally incapacitated to the point where she is physically and spiritual unable to answer it. Whatever the cause — and she’s pretty sure that’s it — Laura knew she had to do something to get herself to use the phone more.

Her cell phone, especially, was a big problem, since she never knew where it was — except for knowing that it was never where it was supposed to be — in her bag or on her person when she left the house — and it was never charged and no matter when Brendan tried to reach her on it she never ever answered it. Laura knew that the only way she would ever overcome her phone issue in general, and her cellphone issue in particular, was to trick herself into having new and positive associations with her phone. Which meant she was going to have to buy something shiny and cool and gadget-like to appeal to her sense of novelty.

At first, she thought of getting an iPhone because, well, Laura’s a Mac person and assumed she would naturally be more comfortable — emotionally and spiritually and psychologically and physically and telecommunically due to her “I”-if-ication indoctrination [by Apple — everything with the maniacally egomaniacal “i” in front of it]) — with their supercool phone. But besides the fact that at the time it was $399 and not on her Verizon plan, she realized that it was, quite simply and as embarrassing and un-Mac-like as it was to admit, it was just too much phone for her. It was too much phone for Laura — and she knew that she would never in a million years be able to learn how to use it AND get anything done — anything besides playing with her iPhone, that is. It was bad enough already with her iMac (or iBook, or whatever her sleek black Apple laptop is now called, they keep changing it) — trying to actually get work done in the face of all the fun stuff she can waste time doing with her computer.

So Laura decided on the Blackberry Curve — brand new to Verizon, and if this weren’t so incredibly boring she would add in how she sleuthed the fact that it was coming out and ordered it online before it sold out. (Or maybe that was just a big stupid marketing ploy that she fell hook line and sinker for). She was so excited to get it and new instantly that it was going to change her relationship — in a positive way — with phones.

The set-up and self-education took hours: she had to take it out of the box, figure out the charger, the buttons, the track ball, the keypad, the functions, the texting, the emailing, the phone log, her contacts list, the little memo pad, the to-do-list list maker, and about twenty other things which didn’t include actually understanding how to use it as an actual phone. She realized that omission the first time her Blackberry rang and she had no idea how to answer the fucking thing. But what really took up her time was this idiotic game called Brickbreaker which for some stupid reason she started playing and hasn’t ever quite stopped playing. In fact, Laura’s actually jonesing to play Brickbreaker right now but she doesn’t want to stop branting to play some completely addictive stupid PDA game like an airport businessman killing time between flights. The good news is: Laura can now get her email anywhere and can’t believe how cool it is to be able to check her email in the parking lot of Whole Foods or in her car in front of her shrink’s office or at the mall (she doesn’t really go to the mall but if she did she would definitely check it there) and she loves the fact that she finally knows the philosophical and experiential and existential differences between emailing and voice-mail and texting: that is, when you want to do one as opposed to another at any given moment in time.

4. The school year ended.

Yes, this really shouldn’t be such a big deal since Laura only has one kid, but for some reason it was kind of overwhelming, what with the parties and lunches and playdates and end of year events that always come, you know, at the end of the year. Laura knows that she would never ever in a million years be able to handle more than one kid, because she’s just to uncoordinated and disorganized even with the one, but she still feels this is a valid excuse to partially explain her lack of branting.

5. Her sister and her brother-in-law and her niece (the aforementioned Pickle) and her nephew (”the monkey”) came in from LA for Laura’s father’s 80th birthday.

Yes, it was a great 10 days. There was a party at her parents’ condo’s social room, a trip to Fenway to see a Red Sox game (Laura’s first time ever at Fenway), and lots of fun shopping trips and dinners out despite really shitty rainy weather — the kind with big scary thunderstorms and giant hail that make people who live on the left coast glad they live there and not here. No one was sadder than Laura to see them go — not even Ben, who was very sad they left — and at the time there was a chance that Laura and Brendan and Ben would head out to LA at the end of August for a visit but at this point that’s probably not going to happen.

6. Ben went to camp.

And actually had a great time. This after complaining and complaining that he didn’t want to go to camp and just wanted to stay home and “relax.”

7. The book Laura’s writing is due on September 1.

Get Over Yourself — the full manuscript — has had to be written in a rather short period of time. Which made branting seem like a luxury. In fact, Laura should probably quit now with the ridiculous epic 10,000 word make-up brant already so she can get back to writing…

8. Facebook.

Laura thinks she has it pretty much under control now, but every few days she spends an inordinate amount of time on Facebook. She’s less a participant these days than voyeur — meaning that she rarely updates her status or pokes anyone and prefers to just read people’s status updates and see who’s poking whom — but it still wastes an awful lot of time that she really needs to put to better use. Like into branting.

So you write a review of someone’s book, then your review gets reviewed: go figure.

Here’s the link to Colleen Dealy’s piece, written with her radio-show co-host Taylor Baldwin, now up on the Huffington Post: click here. The only problem — not that Laura’s complaining! — is that there was some kind of mix-up because the photo of the blond woman on the post is neither Colleen or Taylor. Until we get that fixed, check out the new website for their show, The Good Stuff.