Laura wants to assure those out there who are deeply confused about her brant-reader-counter that she, too, is confused, and is trying to get to the bottom of the meaning behind the oddly low numbers. Laura knows these numbers are low because she and others have read and re-read brants yesterday to test the counter and yet the numbers haven’t changed. Please stay tuned for more information on how this problem is being corrected….
Laura feels the need to explain why there is suddenly something at the end of each brant post that shows the number of people up until that particular point who have read that particular brant post.
As Laura confessed in an earlier brant (or, in several earlier brants), she was deeply concerned that (almost) no one was reading her brant and the fact that she thought that (almost) no one was reading her brant made it very hard for her to feel motivated to continue branting. A circular conundrum certainly, but one nonetheless Laura felt compelled to at least try to fix.
And so she badgered and begged and cajoled her amazing web guy to install a “plug-in” to her brant that would then count how many readers each post was getting. As she was busy branting last night, Laura suddenly realized that the “counting plug-in” was actually installed and she couldn’t wait to start getting the feedback she so desperately needed.
However, (due to ego-sparing reasons) Laura also feels compelled to explain that because the counting plug-in was just installed last night, the count-per-post doesn’t take into account all the months of past post-readings that Laura’s brant certainly had. And so, if and when you see a “0″ or a “1″ or a “2″ beneath a post telling you that that was the number of readers who had read that post before you, Laura implores you to understand that there were indeed previous readers of that post whose “reading” was not counted.
[© HFPA” and “64th Golden Globe Awards”]
Laura would like to call attention to the amazing fact that when Kyra Sedgwick accepted her Golden Globe Award on Monday night for Best Lead Actress in a Drama Series, one of the people she thanked was her publicist. While Laura was already a huge fan of Kyra Sedgwick in “The Closer,” she couldn’t help but feel a gigantic mushroom cloud of respect and admiration for a celebrity who would be gracious and thoughtful enough to remember to thank her publicist anytime and anywhere, let alone at a major awards’ ceremony.
Laura is particularly sensitive (some might go so far as to say hypersensitive) to this Lack of Public Publicist Recognition (LPPR), of course, since she was a publicist for many years and can count on the fingers of one hand the times she was thanked with a note or flowers — or simply acknowledged verbally with just plain words!– for her hard work and because (warning! shameless self-promotion alert!) Julia Einstein, the character in her latest novel, Piece of Work, is a celebrity publicist tormented by an extremely abusive hasbeen and saddled with the hasbeen’s unlikely comeback. And so you can see why Laura would be so moved and impressed with Kyra Sedgwick and her acceptance speech.
Laura thinks whoever Kyra Sedgwick’s publicist is (Laura didn’t write down the name as she was too shocked by the acknowledgement itself to have the presence of mind to take proper notes for a future brant) should feel extremely lucky to have Kyra Sedgwick as a client. And, if Laura knows anything about anything (a questionable assumption, at best), Kyra Sedgwick’s publicist probably does feel incredibly lucky.
Laura just wants to be sure she’s been accurate and clear and fair in her self-reportage (a.k.a. branting) about her breast surgery. So here are a few very important points she wants to be sure she communicates to anyone reading her Breast Brants:
1) While Laura opted for breast reconstruction surgery (and has complained about the difficult and prolonged recovery ever since but not about the results which are terrific!), it’s important to note that not every woman diagnosed with breast cancer wants to have reconstructive surgery.
Also, not every woman is able to have the sort of reconstructive surgery Laura had. For instance, some women are too thin to have the “tummy tuck”-TRAM-flap surgery that she had (although Laura can’t imagine who these people are and why they are too fit and in shape to have “extra flab” for various just-in-case procedures such as this one, but that’s another brant) and opt instead to have breast implants used. And sometimes radiation to the breast makes it impossible for the breast to be reconstructed later. Laura just didn’t want everyone to think that you have to have reconstruction or that everyone can have reconstruction. As many of the websites Laura has linked to in her breast brants show, there are lots and lots of different options for women depending on their diagnoses and their feelings on the reconstruction vs. non-reconstruction issue. Laura feels lucky that she was able to choose whether or not to have reconstruction at all and also that she chose this type of reconstruction in particular.
2) Again, while Laura has complained about the difficult and lengthy physical recovery of the TRAM-flap breast reconstruction surgery, she wants very much to clarify the fact that she would recommend this procedure to anyone interested in having it and that she herself would do it again were she faced with the same decision. This is 100% completely true despite all of her complaining about the discomfort and difficulty of the recovery.
Laura also wants to be sure to say that despite all her complaining about the recovery, the cosmetic result — i.e., the newly reconstructed breasts — is pretty fantastic (or, will be when Laura is finished with a few more cosmetic changes to the breasts — more about that later). Laura wants to communicate the importance, however, of finding the best and most talented plastic surgeon possible for this sort of reconstruction (or any sort of reconstruction). Laura was incredibly lucky to have both a brilliant and expert breast surgeon (Dr. Duggan) performing her medically-related breast surgery, and also to have an incredibly talented plastic surgeon (Dr. Chun) performing the cosmetic-reconstruction.
3) Living in Boston, minutes away from the Bermuda Triangle of Harvard Medical School, The Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and The Sagoff Breast Centre, Laura knew she was getting the best diagnostic care and the best treatment plan available. And yet still she was advised to get a second opinion and so she did (she had a friend who had a friend who was a renowned oncologist at Johns Hopkins and this friend sent Laura’s information to him to see what he thought and he agreed completely with the treatment plan she’d been advised to follow). Laura recommends that everyone get a second opinion even though in the midst of all the turmoil one goes through at the beginning of a diagnosis, running around looking for a second opinion seems almost too much to bear. But it is one of the most important parts of the whole recovery/survival process. Especiallly for people who don’t live near some of the best treatment centers/cities in the country, it’s important to get the absolute best advice at the very beginning so that you can feel assured that the subsequent treatment protocol you follow at your local hospital will be the very best it can possibly be.
4) While Laura complained bitterly about being prodded and pushed into leaving the hospital before she felt ready, she should have mentioned the very important fact that she was very lucky to have excellent medical coverage (Tufts Plan) which entitled her to several visits from a visiting nurse. Linda Stern, Laura’s visiting nurse, showed up for the first time on Thanksgiving Day (yes, her turkey was in the oven waiting for her to come home to baste and serve it) and Laura truly doesn’t know what she would have done without her that day and on the other days Linda came. As Laura mentioned in Breast Brant II, these days most surgical patients leave the hospital before they feel ready with complicated instructions for “self care” at home, and only some of them are lucky enough to have the sort of medical coverage that entitles them to this incredibly helpful Visiting Nurse service. Laura recommends to anyone facing breast surgery or any other sort of surgery to find out whether or not their medical plan makes them eligible for this type of home care. If they do not have this available to them through their health plan, they should strongly consider obtaining information on a local Visiting Nurse service before their surgery just so they have the information should they really need it. (Believe me, you don’t want to be flipping through the Yellow Pages the day you return home from the hospital…). Ask your health plan provider for names of services in your area or ask your local hospital to recommend good visiting nurse services. Even though it might be an out-of-pocket expense, it might be an absolute necessity in your recovery.
5) One last thing Laura wants to mention about health-insurance options is that unbeknownst to her, whenever a Tufts Plan subscriber receives a cancer diagnosis, a Tufts Plan Case Manager is assigned to the subscriber in order to help figure out beforehand all the things that subscriber will need. Laura was called multiple times before her surgery by a terrific case manager, Christine Wells, who went through all the things Laura would need to think about before and after her surgery — including preparing food in advance and freezing it; getting a help-schedule in place with friends and family; understanding the nature of the surgery itself and what the recovery would entail and how long it would last; informing her that she was entitled to a Visiting Nurse service who would help her upon her return home from the hospital, etc. This was an invaluable service that Laura felt grateful to have, though she also felt grateful for the fact that she had all sorts of support already in place (husband, friends, neighbors) to help her. Some health plans offer this pre-surgical “case management” service and Laura would advise anyone facing surgery to check and see if their health plan offers it. If not, she’d advise them to ask their surgeon lots of questions about recovery issues and also to scour all the excellent breast cancer websites which provide a great deal of information on both the medical aspects of the surgery as well as the practical aspects as a result of the surgery (discussion groups are especially good for this, as are the general FAQ pages).
6. Last but not least, Laura hopes she has not come off sounding like a wanna-be expert and smarty-pants know-it-all about breast cancer. Certainly she knows absolutely nothing about the chemo and radiation aspects of the treatment process and recommends that people turn to all the excellent resources on the internet and at their local hospital for information on those all-important topics. Laura is simply sharing her anecdotal experience and some of the things she learned during the diagnostic and surgical processes of her treatment on the off-chance that some people might find her information useful.
As Laura mentioned in her last (b)rant about the automatic drip coffee machines, there always seems to be a huge craze in kitchen accessories and gadgets and toys. Several years ago, Laura was amazed that the KitchenAid Stand Mixer, once used mainly by professional cooks and serious home cooks, was suddenly everywhere. Everywhere! Not only was it featured in the usual serious-home-cook sorts of catalogs and stores like Williams-Sonoma, but suddenly every newspaper ad, every Macy’s and Sears and J.C. Penney’s and Target and KMart and Walmart and Kohls Sunday circular had a gorgeous shiny fancy huge KitchenAid Stand Mixer like this one:
Which meant that suddenly, every Tom, Dick, and Harry had a standing mixer in their kitchen, as if they really needed it and couldn’t live without it. It was as if the marketing department at KitchenAid decided that they were going to try to convince every American family that in addition to televisions and computers, no household was complete without a stand mixer.
Laura has decided that the latest must-have kitchen toy is even more ridiculous than the standing mixer, which, to be fair, many people do use and can use for many different reasons — to mix batters and doughs for cakes and breads and cupcakes and muffins and pie crusts and quiches, to name only a few baked items. But this new toy is so specific, so specialized, so odd and so creepy, that it can only do one thing:
Make melted chocolate flow from a fountain.
Here’s one:
[Chocolate Fountain 101.]
[The Basic No-Frills Model]
Here’s another:
[The SUV of Chocolate Fountains.]
[In case the basic one just isn’t big enough.]
And another:
[Laura’s really glad they showed the fondue stick with the strawberry so she could see exactly how to use the chocolate fountain were she ever to end up with one. She’s also really glad that they’ve shown the chocolate fountain surrounded with fruit, making it clear that this small appliance is not only fun but a health and fitness product as well! In fact, why get a juicer when you can have a chocolate fountain?]
Laura, of course, at 44, is old enough to remember the old-fashioned late 70s simple non-automatic kind of fondue pot, but just in case any of her brant-readers are too young to remember them, she’s posting a photo here of this long lost culinary cultural artifact:
[circa 1970]
[Simple. Elegant. Mod. Cheap.]
Laura thinks these chocolate fountains are the most ridiculous things she’s ever seen, and if it were the kind of small appliance that wasn’t so suddenly ubiquitous, she would let it go. But, like the KitchenAid Stand Mixer, this strange “chocolate fountain” is everywhere. Everywhere! (Except in Laura’s kitchen, of course, though she does have a KitchenAid Stand Mixer which her sister got for her and Brendan as a wedding present and which took Laura about 22 days to decide on what color she wanted — Laura decided to go bold for once in her life, and picked the bright orange tangerine color — and which still, to this day, Laura has never actually used because she doesn’t know how to use it but which Brendan has used a thousand times so it’s definitely not going to waste.)
But back to this business with the chocolate fountains: Who is buying them? And why are they buying them? Has anyone ever actually had chocolate fondue? Has anyone actually known someone who has ever had chocolate fondue? Does anyone actually know someone who owns one of these chocolate fountain machines? Has anyone ever seen one of these chocolate fountains in real life, in action? Laura would love to hear from anyone that has an answer to any of the questions she’s posed above, especially the one’s relating to first-hand personal experience with this ridiculous small appliance.
In any case, Laura thought that, given her previous breast brant, she should post a picture of the “Cook for the Cure®” Pink “fight breast cancer” KitchenAid Stand Mixer which raises money for the Susan G. Komen Breast Center Foundation (KitchenAid donates $50 to the Komen Breast Center for every Pink Stand Mixer purchased.)
It’s quite something and for such a good cause! In fact, since Laura saw this in a store and on the Internet, she’s had to question her past decision: If this pink color had been available at the time her sister was giving her one, would she have still chosen the bright-orange tangerine color or would she have chosen the pink?
Some questions, like this one, and the ones about the chocolate fountain, simply cannot be answered.
Laura would like to know when the automatic drip coffee-maker (ADCM) became so expensive.
She’s not talking about those ridiculous NASA-control-panelled microwave-sized take-out-a-second-mortgage-on -the-house home espresso and capuccino and latte makers (HECLM) that have flooded the market recently the way Kitchen-Aid’s ubiquitous Stand Mixer did several years ago. But it seems like it was just yesterday that you could get a perfectly good and even semi-sleek- looking (i.e., black plastic instead of Mr. Coffee’s original beige-plastic which always looked like formerly-white-now-coffee- stained plastic) coffee maker for somewhere in the vicinity of $49.99. Which, at the time, wasn’t even that cheap. But this weekend, after the coffee maker Laura and Brendan had had for less than a year — and which they had bought, on sale, at Bloomingdales for $79.99 — stopped working, Laura went to Linens’ N’ Things to find another and realized this was no longer the case.
Laura really hates Linens ‘N Things because she always thinks she’s going to find everything she needs there but usually leaves deeply disappointed for a variety of reasons, one of which might quite simply be the harsh depressing lighting of the store itself and the less-than appealing or aesthetic displays of merchandise (Laura is very sensitive to things like that), and she’s not quite sure why she went there (was she courting disappointment? trying to depress herself for some unknown reason?) except for the plain and simple reason that she thought she’d be able to find a cheaper ADCM there than at Bloomingdales.
Anyway, after staring at the selection of ADCMs — all the Brauns and the Krups and the Cuisinarts — in the way that Laura always stares at walls of merchandise when she needs to buy things — whether it’s coffee makers or file cards or tomato sauce — she could feel that glazed look in her eyes start and she knew it was going to be downhill from there. Only this time, that glazed look wasn’t just the physical manifestation of the psychological state of indecisiveness. It was something else. It was anger. Umbraged that most of the coffee makers were in the $99.00 - $129.00 range — and there was even one for $159!!! and another for $299!!! — Laura finally felt an unfamiliar pang of Scroogian Dickensian cheapness take over. Instead of being attracted by the expensive ADCMs, she was actually repelled by them — repelled by the notion that these small plastic appliances were so offensively expensive.
And so while she didn’t buy the absolute cheapest one there (she thinks there was one for $19.99 and one for $29.99) she chose one for $39.99, made by Farberware. Laura knew that Farberware made pots and pans but she wasn’t aware that they were now in the small appliance/ADCM business. Laura also knew that because of their lack of experience with and the low price point of their automatic drip coffeemaker she was probably going to be in for one of those disappointing but true you get what you pay for life experiences. And yet, she didn’t care.
She brought the cheap Farberware coffee maker home feeling extremely virtuous and thrifty, and despite all suspicions to the contrary (Brendan was very wary of the idea that this machine would be able to make coffee potable enough for two coffee snobs like them), the next morning when Brendan set it up and made the coffee, it worked just fine. The machine will probably stop working in a month, and then they’ll swing back to buying one of the more expensive ones (which will break in a year), but at least Laura’s first attempts at smarter money management in 2007 was successful.
Again, Laura’s feeling a little uncomfortable about the terminology, but she’s just going to have to deal with it and get on with her story about the really reallly reallllllly fun evening she got to spend with a friend’s book group right where she lives.
Actually, Laura knew several of the women in the group — Gail Herman, who she adores, and who has managed to be a successful children’s book writer for years despite the fact that she has three (great) kids, is a good friend of Laura’s (their kids, Laura’s Benji and Gail’s Bennett, went to the same preschool — The Preschool Experience — and have stayed friends since); Chris Granfield is another woman who Laura knew from The Preschool Experience, as is Portia Durbin. Laura had never met the other women — the hostess, Anne Sperry; Bonnie Barber, Reed Donahue, and Tina Madeus — but she had met Jane Hong and Cynthia Casey briefly at one of her local signings and Jane Quinn is someone Laura had known when Laura’s Benji and Jane’s Nola were together in the same “educational playgroup” run by “the dour swede” that Laura describes in Piece of Work (but who was actually Dutch in real life) and they had a good time reminiscing about the joylessness of the twice- or thrice-weekly playgroup.
Anyway, they were a really great group of women and Anne’s house was beautiful (and neat! a remarkable feat, Anne explained, since her children had been home since 12:30 p.m.!) and as all of them said incredibly nice things about the book and quoted passages from it and asked her questions about it Laura could practically feel her ego poofing up like a giant helium balloon but she didn’t care. She was having a fantastic night and she deserved it! That’s probably the reason she talked non-stop and barely let her readers get a word in edgewise. Which backfired when she went home and fell into a black hole of regret for talking so much (why did she blab non-stop?! was it because she’d barely been out of her house since mid-November? were people annoyed that the meeting went to 10:30 p.m. instead of to it’s usual 9:30 p.m.?!). But luckily Gail, who had picked her up and dropped her off (door to door service. Laura loves Gail.) reassured her in the car and by the time Laura got into bed she felt better (except for the fact that her throat was actually a little sore from talking so much).
One of the funniest parts about the whole evening is that in Gail’s minivan, right when they arrived at Anne’s house and right before Gail and Laura went in, Gail very tactfully mentioned the fact that Laura had mentioned one of the book group member’s relatives in the book and referred to that relative as a hasbeen. Laura instantly felt sick to her stomach and wondered if there was a way to get Gail to drive her home immediately, but Gail assured her that this book group member had a great sense of humor and probably wasn’t bent out of shape at all about this potentially disastrous gaffe. This made Laura feel a little bit better — especially since she truly has a deep affection for hasbeens in general and this particular (questionable) hasbeen in particular. And when she actually met the book group member with the famous relative-by-marriage, Laura felt completely better. Reed was hilarious and the group had a great laugh about Laura’s near panic attack in the minivan and when the meeting was over Reed had Laura sign a book to her relative-by-marriage’s spouse who is also famous and of whom Laura is a huge fan!
Laura wishes she had a photograph of the group — she’s hoping that they take one and email it to her and if they do she’ll post it. But photo or no photo, Laura thanks them for reading her book and inviting her to come. She had a terrific evening.
A very funny thing happened to Laura about a week ago. She got an email from John D. Bailey, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher at Montana State University who said he’d read Animal Husbandry when it was published and really liked it. In fact, he actually read it while he was writing his dissertation on reproductive physiology which included the sexual behavior of bulls — specifically, “The Coolidge Effect” which Laura referred to in the book as “The Old-Cow New-Cow Theory.”
Laura would have loved John Bailey’s email enough, except that it got even better because he actually sent Laura the link to his dissertation (!) which updates some of the research that Laura based her theories on. She hopes he doesn’t mind if she makes it available here since after reading just the abstract and the first 10 or so pages Laura was fascinated and completely engrossed.
(She plans, of course, to read the entire 100+pp dissertation as soon as she gets some work done.)
Laura wants to share two really fun experiences she had recently phoning in to two different reading groups, but first she has to say that she’s more than a little confused about the correct terminology. That is, is the correct term for a group of people who get together usually monthly to discuss a book they’ve agreed to read a reading group? Or, a readers’ group? OR, a book group? OR, a book club? Usually before Laura starts writing anything — an email, a brant entry, a book — she likes to have her facts straight so if someone out there has an opinion on the above question, Laura would love to hear from them.
Okay. Back to Laura’s two fun phoners. The first one she did — in fact, the first ever by-phone book/reading/readers’ group/club Laura ever did — was with a terrific group of women in LaBelle, Florida, and the second one she did later that same evening was with a fantastic group of women — Babes and Books — in Bellingham, Washington. The way these things work, she found out last Monday night, is that the group/club calls the author, and then they put the author on speakerphone. Sometimes the group/club meets in a library, and sometimes they’re in someone’s home, but whichever the location, the author is still talking to people they can’t see and who can’t see them (which in Laura’s case was great, since she didn’t have to change out of her black “yoga” pants).
Despite the strangeness of such a set up — the worst part being that when you are talking (and Laura was talking a lot. As she should. Right? I mean, isn’t that the whole point of the phone-in? To talk a lot?) all you can hear is the sound of your own voice, not any of the reaction noise (assuming there is reaction noise) like laughter or side comments–Laura really enjoyed talking to these two groups a lot. They had a lot of positive things to say about Piece of Work — about the authenticity of how it feels for women with kids to go back to work, and about the authenticity of the sort of stress families face when one spouse loses their job and can’t find another one for a while. Laura was glad about that — one of the best compliments an author can hear is that the things they’re writing about sound and feel true to the reader. They also had lots of questions about escorting famous authors around the country (which is what Laura did when she was a book publicist years ago and which was on occasion so traumatic that she still hasn’t gotten over it yet).
So thanks to both book/readers’/reading groups/clubs for winning her on readinggroupguides.com and having her “visit” with them. She had a great time.
