So the book is about...

Lately, I have been receiving a lot of questions about the book I am writing.

I imagine this influx of curiosity is due to vigor with which I attempt to force everyone and anyone with whom I communicate to read my blog. Rather generously, these victims are choosing to believe that my relentless enthusiasm for my own blog could not merely be narcissistic—that my inane coersion must actually have a point. They want to know what is at the bottom of this blogging, and assume my point, my raison d’etre, lies within the book. That seems reasonable to me.

But truthfully, book or no book, I just want people to read my blog. I would like it if people read my blog religiously and looked forward to their daily dose, the way a sugar addict looks forward to chocolate. Really, I would just like for my blog to complete people—like Dorothy Boyd did for Jerry Maguire.

The nice thing about me is that I have always had reasonable expectations for my life.

But about the book--I officially and absolutely decided to write a book on the day I celebrated my 32nd birthday. It actually was my 32nd birthday, so the celebration made a certain degree of sense.

A week prior to my birthday, I went to see a reflexologist who I visited in part because having your feet massaged is a strange and unusual pleasure, but mostly because I was seeking some objective life guidance.

Incidentally, I am often seeking objective life guidance from a seemingly endless stream of sources, each of whom possesses a special set of skills differing from my own special set of skills (TBD, in my case) and therefore rendering them qualified to opine on my situation. Often times these quests are inadvertent intentions, and seem to be largely driven by my subconscious. And often times they surprise me in both theory and actuality.

For example it is only when I am fully reclined in what I suspect to be a former dentist’s chair in a basement room where the décor is rife with images of angels and butterflies, incense is wafting around, and my left foot is in the hand of the stranger whose “office” I am now soliciting, that I wonder: “How did this ever come about?” My role in my own life at times seems so removed that I have wondered if I am being beamed away during sleep.

Oddly, I have moments like these quite frequently.

Now, if you subscribe to the sort of new age thinking that there are no mistakes, then I suppose my finding myself in these unusual situations is not due to any sort of fluke, but could rather be interpreted as times when I am being governed by my “true” self or my “higher” self. Yet in plain, non-spiritual, skeptical English (my personal tone of choice), what is going on is as follows: I find myself in strange situations because I am a strange situation personified.

In short, I am a bit of a mess.

I seem to be flailing through life, trying to make heads and tails of the meaning of it all, and often feeling like I am making no headway. What I have not yet done is to have figured out how to wrestle my gremlins, decide upon a color for my parachute, and/or learn what to expect when I am not interested in expecting whatsoever. These "failures" have consumed me for years. And why?

I haven't the foggiest now that I am really thinking about it.

So this realization struck me as I stared at my foot and the stranger holding it: I am a hot mess and I must write a book about it.

And it is not just about me, by the way. Narcissism aside.

As I engage in conversation with other women, I continually find that we all seem to focus on the areas of our lives where we feel we have somehow "failed." We all have our own specific set of expectations, yet we all seem to hold ourselves to standards that are absurdly high, and often inhuman. While the opportunities available to women are plentiful and appreciated beyond measure, it is exhausting to live in a society that is constantly touting how we can, and indeed should, "have it all." To feel that if we do not take advantage of each and every way it means to be a modern woman, then we are somehow falling short.

I propose that maybe we do not need it all. Maybe we do not want it all. And maybe we would feel a lot better if we came to terms with the fact that what we are, what we have, and what we are doing is just great.

Of course we can be grateful for the society in which we live, but we also need to recoginize our limitations, lest we spend the bulk of our lives measuring out our failures in coffeespoons, Prufrock style.

Or, as in my case, we trundle off to another basement of fairies, angels, and foot doctors to seek the answers from another patchouli-scented sage and leave somewhat inspired and somewhat disappointed. It is a new age sort of hamster wheel.

And let me tell you something: I want off that particular wheel. Hamsters are far worse than birds in my book. Ew.

So my book is about how we can (happily) come to terms with being who we are without spending so much time worrying about who we are not. Sound interesting?